Knitting and Madeleines

In Remembrance of Things Past, the taste of a madeleine spurs Proust to recall a memory. On a far more prosaic level, I'm noticing that knitting with color has a similar effect. Each square summons up for me a bit of my history, a recollection of an experience.

This square? Those three-layer candies from my childhood. Sort of a small rectangular slab, with each color juxtaposed against the next. Pink, cream, chocolate. The flavor? Coconut, something like marzipan, or almond.

The latest square? Girl Scouts.

I never made it past Brownies. But didn't we all know someone in grade school who was a career scout, and proudly wore her uniform and sash full of badges to school on Scout day? Like Proust tasting a single bite of the madeleine, and sending himself back into the past, this square, as I was stitching it up, brought back to me my marginal relationship with scouting. A square that reminds me of that deep green uniform, crossed with the sash full of badges. The yellow is the same color as the embroidery around the edge of the badge.

I've settled on a plan for my squares. Two background colors, two contrast colors.
I use each of the contrast colors (here, the yellow and the lime green) to knit two squares with one background color (the forest green). Then two more mitered squares with each contrast striped with the other contrast(the sky blue). Assembled so that the same background color is on the diagonal from its mate (for example, the forest green squares at the top left hand and bottom right hand of the picture.) Oh, yeah, and the stripes alternate, so that none of the stripes meet each other in the same color. All four colors work together, versus the beginning plan of contrasting a bright with a dull color. If I had a color wheel handy, I think that I'd discover that I'm gravitating toward colors that neighbor each other.

It's really much, much easier in practice. Cast on 72 stitches, alternate colors every six rows, and just play. No matter what you do, something good comes out of it. And how many things can you say that about?