That Which We Call a Shawl

About ten years ago, at the height of the dot-com bubble, somebody pointed me at the dack web economy bullshit generator, which I've mentioned before. (I think some people used it to write their business plans, back when almost anyone with a pulse and something vaguely resembling a high-tech business plan could get venture capital, but I digress.) I've also mentioned how I hate naming patterns, because, especially if I'm submitting a pattern for publication, I feel like I have to come up with something artful and clever, and in reaction against that I tend to prefer names like Chicken Pox.

It reminds me of the time my officemate and I, having received identical sets of Sharpie markers from a coworker as a Christmas gift (don't get me wrong, they were really nice pens), set about naming the colors; among our favorites were, as I recall, Pond Scum, Contusion, and Afterbirth. But again I digress.

It wasn't until I was reading today about Wendy's Diamonds With a Bunch of Crap in the Middle shawl (which is a lovely shawl that will soon have a more conventional name, unless a whole bunch of people vote for the original one) that I thought of creating a pattern-name generator. Take some adjectives like amethyst, cerulean, evening, midnight, moonlight, mistral, misty, mystic, starlit, sunrise, tidal, twilight, and mix and match at random with nouns like buttercup, interlude, lake, lilac, meadow, mountain, pansy, primrose, rose, serenade, sonata, valley, violet... you get the idea. Of course some combinations wouldn't work too well (mistral buttercup?), but you could always try again. I'm taking suggestions for adjectives and nouns; please be as creative and/or inappropriate as you wish.

Meanwhile, if it were spring, I would have things like this in my yard:


But it's not. Yet. I continue to wait, not very patiently.