Mutant daffodils and odd shrubs

For the Fall 2004 "Way Beyond the Hebrides" KBTH Virtual Conference, I presented a "positively polygonal" class that centred on different ways to knit various polygons from the centre out.

The KBTH list and server where that and other resources resided went through some changes with the end result being that the KBTH list of today and the KBTH server of today are not the same.

Not all of the resources that were on the original server made the shift to the newserver. My class materials were among the didn't make the shift so it was a good thing that I decided to mirror the class on my web page. Positively polygonal is one of the most requested parts of the web page and not just from bots.

As a practical matter, my feeling is that centre out knitting is superiour to perimeter in knitting because you can just stop increasing when the item is big enough rather than casting on a whole bunch of stitches and taking the leap of faith that your decreases will result in the size you want.

As a totally impractical matter, polygons are just plan fun and a mistake or two (okay maybe three or more) along the way got me knitting stars, flowers and more.

I was particularly proud of the daffodils I designed and they have been real crowd pleasers. As it turns out, my knitted daffodils are mutants -- that's right not real daffodils since real daffodils have six petals around the trumpet section not five as mine do.

While I like my mutants, I've put creating more realistic daffodils on my list of things to do. Easy enough, the mutants are based on pentagons and the real deals will use hexagons. But I do wonder how it is that these mutants could have fooled so many people (self included) into believing that they were the real deal for so long -- insert woo-woo music here. But here's to daffs, mutants or otherwise that brighten my day and my home.

Onto odd shrubs, and no, this isn't political. On a street corner in the Middletown/Mission Hills area of San Diego, California, there are a couple of plants that for some reason or another have always reminded me of what I can only describe as a Vegas showgirl bison.

Now maybe the idea of a bison as showgirl is my own fanciful spin on the palm emerging from behind the shrub in question but I sort of like the idea and as part of my on going weird images from the hood series, I'm sharing this little snippet of weird.