A Rose by Any Other Name

Sometimes, you just have to know when to give in. I reached that point yesterday, when I realized that the growing yarn snarl hanging from Big Girl's otherwise lovely mittens-in-progress was threatening to go from unmanageable to irredeemable. So, rather than do what I normally do -- stick my fingers in my ears and loudly sing "lalala, I can't heeeeeeear you," hoping that the problem will magically go away of its own accord -- I actually stopped knitting, unwound about half the rainbow yarn from its cake, and cut. Once I rewound the yarn, I had my original solid-color yarn still being worked from both ends of the same cake, but with the much-needed ability to unwind the rainbow yarn when the four independent strands started to tangle.

Here's what I'm up to:

I lovelovelove how the colors are turning out. I dyed the rainbow skein myself using leftover Easter dyes, and quite frankly, I wasn't at all sure if I liked the result. The yellows muddied, the purples hardly showed...it was a definite disappointment in the skein.

But, as with most creative endeavors, it's more about how you use the materials you have than about what exactly those materials are. And I did manage to find just about the perfect use for that jacked-up skein of rainbow yarn: Robin Hansen's Salt and Pepper Mitten pattern.

Instead of the colors piling atop one another, competing and clashing, the alternating stitch pattern allows the colors to flow harmoniously, in gentle waves. I couldn't be happier with this project.

Except.

I can't for the life of me think of what to call it.

Now, until ravelry became the greatest thing ever to happen to the fiber world at large, no one but artists named their projects. When my mother knit a sweater, she called it "that blue sweater" or "the sweater in the hall closet" or "your sweater, you know which sweater I mean, and don't you give me that look young lady, you just march yourself back to your room and put it on rightthisminute."

Now, however, every project must have a name. If my mittens were black and white, I could simply call them my Salt and Pepper Mittens and leave it at that. For now, they're on my ravelry page as my "Two-at-a-Time Mittens," which, while accurate, is less than poetic. No, I'm loving the colors so much that I want a name that I love just as much. Something fitting. Something memorable. Something better than "your mittens, mit-tens, the ones I knit for you and put on a string specifically so you couldn't lose them, those mittens, now findthemfindthemfindthem."

Here's a close-up of how the colors play together.

Any suggestions?