I suppose we all have our obsessive-compulsive areas.  One of mine is visual balance.  I have been trying to analyze this, but I’m not really getting anywhere.  Like art, I may not know what makes it good or bad, but I know what I like :)

I had thought, at first, that it had to do with numbers.  I tend to like odd numbers because they have a specific mid-point around which everything else is arranged - like the hub of a wheel.  There’s a center kind of holding everything together.  That doesn’t happen with even numbers.

Take 7 for example:

1…2…3…4...5…6…7

4 is the clear center here, with as many numbers following it as preceding it.

Now look at 8

1…2…3…4...5…6…7…8

The center of this sequence falls between 4 and 5.  But there’s nothing there.*  Yeats would understand this instinctively :)  The center cannot hold, because there is no center!

This is balanced.

This (which is how the stitch pattern is written) isn’t.

I was tempted, at first, to think of this purely in terms of numbers.  Odd numbers balance and even numbers don’t.  But, of course, as soon as I formulated that theory, the following popped into my head…

This only has two parts.  I suppose you could say that it has four parts if you count the dots as separate items - but in either case you’re dealing with an even number.  And yet this balances perfectly.  There is no impulse in the viewer to either add or subtract anything or to adjust it in any way - it is perfect as it is.

So I put it to you - what makes for visual balance in your eyes?

The next hat is under way…

This is the Coraline that I dyed a few days ago.  It’s really too bright for a whole hat (for anyone over the age of six) but it will do nicely for the central panel with darker or more muted shades filling in at the top and bottom.

And please note that it is “balanced”, though it’s the garter stitch that carries the day, not the cables :)

Myria is mightily pleased with her new monitor which she occasionally refers to as “concentrated L33T sauce”.  I take this to mean that it’s good :)  Unfortunately, Jade seems to like it too - likes to sit behind it which drives Myria crazy…

...because Jade is one of the universe’s clumsiest creatures.  See all those tchotchkes on the monitor stand?  Whenever Jade…uh…dismounts, she attempts to take several of them along with her.  In our house, the fog doesn’t come in on little cat feet.  It galumphs in wearing spiked clodhoppers and dragging broken bits of everything it has passed on the way behind it :)

* Yes, there’s an infinty of values there if we’re talking about the number line.  But we’re not :)