The Ravell'd Sleave: nablopomo

14 November 2017

The Story of My For the Birds Top

Hello all! Thanks for your kind and supportive comments on my last post about my finished socks. They are safely tucked away in my Box o' Socks, and I do think by the time I open the box and then wear them that I will feel much more favorably inclined towards them. :-)

Do you remember a while back I posted this picture, showing the beginning of a work-in-progress?

The pattern is Main Street, and the photo above is about halfway through the bottom border of the top. In between finishing my Cranberry Custom Fit sweater and the Annoying Pumpkins socks, I've been working on it for bits of time here and there, especially since I have reached the stockinette portion, which is perfect for knitting while watching TV or podcasts, etc. At the moment, it looks like this:

My photographic skills and lighting, however, cannot really show the lovely shade of the yarn, so here is the link for you to get a better idea of how it actually looks.

OK, so now on to the rest of the story.

When I decided to try to knit this pattern, I didn't have enough of any stash yarn to use. However, I did have a store credit at Hidden River Yarns, so The Tim and I drove over there one weekend day to take a look. My friend (and the owner) Lisa was there, and with her help I decided on the Tern yarn from Quince & Co., and also decided to try a color other than the usual blues and greens that make up most of my sweaters and knitted tops. We decided on the colorway Dusk, shown on their website in the link provided above. I was able to get what I needed for making this pattern with my store credit, which was exciting because it was "free" (yes, I know not really, but work with me here).

So I had nice yarn, a pattern I wanted to knit named for a type of bird, and then there was the dye lot - 007! (Cue James Bond theme.)

And so, this became my For the Birds Top.

Why, you ask?

Tern = bird

007 = James Bond

But James Bond is not quite who you think he is. Nope, not the REAL James Bond.

Ian Fleming, the creator of the James Bond 007 stories, was an amateur birder. He was very conscientious, keeping lists of birds he had seen, where he saw them, etc. At the time he was creating his master spy detective, he was also reading a book (possibly Birds of the West Indies), written by James Bond.

WAIT? What?

Yep, James Bond was an actual person, and a well-known ornithologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He and Fleming even met a few times. Reports say that he got tired of people asking him about his name, unless it got him a good table at a restaurant. :-)

Now, this is all highly amusing to me. And so, when I started knitting a sweater in a bird-named yarn, with a dye lot number of the master spy, I just *had* to call it For the Birds, to entertain myself!