Inspiration often shows up when you least expect it, spawning from the most unlikely of places. Some people say they get their best ideas in the shower (which, for years, led me to believe that there was an ingredient in shampoo that was like MAGIC IDEA OIL or something), and some only get ideas late at night, and some, like myself, tend to get them like shots out of the blue, seemingly random, when they really should be thinking about something else.
Like, ferinstance, what to make for dinner. Ahem.
Anyway…
The other day, Teri came over and told me that if she was made of money, she knew what she wanted to get me for Christmas. And when prefaced that way, I was fully expecting some kind of livestock, or a super-hi-tech chicken coop, at the very least. But instead, she pointed me to the 500 Pencils website. I believe she saw it on Martha or somesuch.
The heavens opened up. The angelic chorus sang. Tiny cherubim landed on my shoulders and began licking my ear.
It was, in short, awesome.
Consumed by the lustlike desire to draw everything in five hundred part Kodachrome, I poked around the 500 Pencils website for something like an HOUR, reading all the color names. Trying not to make up stories in my head about them, since most of the names are equally as awesome as the colors themselves. I posted about them on Plurk, and tried to justify spending $33 a month for the conceivable future (it’s a nearly two-year subscription) on something we can’t eat or live in.
In the resulting comments on Plurk, my imagination went a little crazy. I mentioned something about getting the set and doing a scent for every color. Or a sock pattern. Or something, even if that was just drooling all over the set at regular intervals.
Someone mentioned that they weren’t sure they wanted to smell like Lobster Bisque, one of the colors. This one, in fact:
And, again undaunted by that whole literal thing, I mentioned that soup is a winter thing. And that lobster pretty much equals Maine. So if you think about it, it could totally be the scent of a Maine winter — crunchy snow and ice, dry evergreen branches, woolen mittens and the faintest wisps of cast-iron woodstove smoke, all set on a backdrop of the Atlantic shore, with cold salt air just barely perceptible in the background.
It was too good of an idea. I ran off from the computer and made the scent, adding in a little spice for warmth and just the right dose of black pine (which is *not* pine-sol pine, btw) to give it some depth.
And since one good idea deserves another, I grabbed the stitch dictionaries and whipped up the sock you see above, in a very simple and easy to do Seashore Rib, modified for socks. (Picture *has* been photoshopped to look a little more like the pencil color, and to mask the real color, which was dyed for another project that isn’t quite live yet. I wanted to pimp this particular yarn base and dyer, however. :>) I took the pictures just a few minutes before the snow started here in North Carolina (an odd occurrence in and of itself), and now it’s up on the Oak River site if you want them. (You get the pattern free if you buy the scent.)
Better still, I emailed the company behind the 500 Pencils club, and heard back from them today — they like the idea of this, and I’m angling to get some of those pencils in my hot little hands at some point, so I’m definitely planning to do more of these scent/color/sock things in the future, when I’ve got more time.
Sometimes, inspiration just comes out of seemingly nowhere.
I love when that happens. Even if it’s around pencils and soup.
