Looking For A Stranded Harmonium

If you signed up for Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 or bought the Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 eBook via Ravelry, you will have seen Muriel’s beautiful design, Looking For A Stranded Harmonium.

I love Muriel’s design so much. It is a joyous celebration of handedness, and was inspired by watching Penguin Cafe Orchestra playing Music For A Found Harmonium and seeing the two hands of the harmonium player at work.

These mitts use exactly the same motif on each hand, which is based on the drone and melody of Music For A Found Harmonium by Penguin Cafe Orchestra (PCO)…

…However, the shading sequence used is different for each hand. The yarn shades are arranged so that the high-contrast area – (the point at which the motif stands out most clearly from the background) – emphasises the part in the music played with that hand. The left hand mitt has an area of high contrast around the part of the pattern that represents the drone, played by the left hand of the harmonium player. The right hand mitt has an area of high contrast around the part of the pattern that represents the melody, played by the right hand of the harmonium player.

I love the amazing way that Muriel has blurred the lines between form and function here, creating mitts that speak to the role played by each hand in this particular piece of music; it’s just so fun and inventive, and so brilliantly MURIEL.

Here is her punch-card for Music For A Found Harmonium. There is a picture of the mismatched mitts below, and the schematic, in which I have tried to highlight how this magical pattern works.

Can you see how the shading sequence for each mitt highlights the part in the music played by that hand?

Throughout Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1 I’ve tried to find the clearest ways to explain the musical aspect of each project for as broad an audience as possible – including non-musicians and folks who don’t read music – as I really want this project to be inviting and accessible.

This is a big reason for having produced videos to explain each design. Videos go a long way towards explaining how each project works, but knowing that not everyone will want the whole course, I also worked at developing graphics to explain and accompany each project.

In this, I was inspired by Tom Barr’s excellent illustrations for Warm Hands book edited by Kate Davies and Jeanette Sloan. A collection of wonderful mitts, mittens and gauntlets produced by a diverse range of contributors, it’s a very happy and colourful book that I love because of the broad range of hand coverings included; the uplifting and colourful styling used throughout; and the aforementioned illustrations by Tom. Looking at his images, I really appreciate how each one communicates an aspect of the design. They are truly lovely illustrations but they are also practical and helpful. I wanted to try and do something similar when making the graphics that accompany each of the designs in Yarnadelic Remixes 0.1.

This is the one I made for Looking For A Stranded Harmonium; I wanted to show how the same pattern changes dramatically on each hand, depending on how the same set of colours are sequenced differently. I hope it goes some way towards showing the special logic that underpins Muriel’s magnificent design.

As well as their rich connections to musicality and handedness, and their associations with the actual music of Music For A Found Harmonium, these mitts work up really quickly and must be a little bit addictive for colour play, as Muriel designed three different colourways using the Yarnadelic yarn palette from John Arbon Textiles (each of which are charted in the eBook).

We worked with several test and sample knitters to check ways of getting different sizes by changing the round and stitch gauges, and also to see if other knitters enjoyed playing with the different shading sequences as much as Muriel did (and everyone did).

I am very inspired by Jo-ann to make a pair in shades that speak to the piano keys and red body of my cherished accordion…

…and thanks to Muriel’s thoughtful creativity underpinning this design, I would especially enjoy thinking about the different parts played in left and right hands while wearing them. Of course, I’d have to arrange Music For A Found Harmonium for accordion but until then, there’s always this old video from ten years ago showing my cherished instrument in action!

Happy KNITTING and SONIKING and shout out to everyone joining in with our Knit and Play-alongs; it’s really nice to read your comments, hear your thoughts on the prompts for each day, and to share the joy of this project with you in ways both big and small.

YOURS IN MISMATCHED MITTS,
Until soon,
Fx