Now you see it...now you don't

My office has a secret Santa gift exchange every year and this year, I drew one of the partners' names. Now, this is a man who, if he wants or needs something, he just goes out and buys it. In other words, almost impossible to shop for.

I have a secret weapon though. I know he is a huge fan of the UofO Ducks and I can knit. So, I had this brilliant idea. I would knit him a scarf in the school colors. But that by itself is too boring so I'll try something I've never done before. Illusion knitting.

Illusion knitting is a technique using a combination of knit and purl stitches to create a hidden pattern. When you look at it straight on, all you see is stripes. But look at it from the side, and you'll see something different. Usually, that something different is a geometric shape but I decided to try an actual message. "Go Ducks"

The designing of the pattern was simple but time-consuming. It involved staring at an Excel spreadsheet for a several hours as I laboriously spelled out Oregon and Go Ducks, using a cross-stitch alphabet pattern. Then separating the rows and offsetting it so that the purl stitches of each row would offset the other rows. Finally, that was completed and the pattern printed.

Then on the the easy part, I thought. I knit up a gauge swatch so I could figure out how many stitches to cast on(~330) and then cast-on using a backwards loop. I knit every green row and use Stockinette for the yellow, switching every other row. But then came the words.

Oh, the process itself isn't hard but it does require a lot of concentration. I thought I was doing great, the stripes were working beautifully and the words were slowly appearing in the scarf. I was several rows into the words when I realized...the words were backwards! I had been reading the pattern right to left and I should have been reading left to right.

I did my best to keep a smile on my face as the words I had worked on so painstakingly for hours disappeared in the few minutes it took to frog all the way back to the row before the pattern began. Oh, the knit-manity!

I see the moon and the moon sees me...

I can't see the man in the moon. I never have been able to see him. Sometimes, if I squint my eyes, I think I can but the harder I look, the more I see the rabbit in the moon. Now, I always assumed that it must be because I grew up in a country that has a rabbit in the moon, not a man. And, when I looked it up, sure enough, the rabbit in the moon is most common in East Asian folklore. In China, the rabbit is the companion to Chang'e, making the elixir of life for her. The story I was always told, which is common in Japan and Korea, is that the rabbit is pounding mochi.

Now, here's the interesting thing. The rabbit also shows up, all the way on the other side of the Pacific, in Aztec mythology. Tecciztecatl, the Aztex lunar deity, could have been the sun god, but was afraid of the sun's fire. He refused and, in the form of a rabbit, was thrown into the moon. How's that for a punishment?

Personally, I find the rabbit in the moon much more interesting than the man in the moon, so I'm not terribly disappointed to see the rabbit. And, it provides a link to childhood, one of the few I can revisit easily and often. Well, as often as the Northwest sky allows.