Cora Tam is a stranded tam, worked in the round in the Fair Isle style employing only two colors per round, with many yarn color changes and repeating motifs. Cora Tam explores setting darker, more saturated colors as background, with the lighter and brighter colors being used for the motif. Arlene further employs placing motif elements so they are centered between the crown decrease lines to create a “Rosette” design.

My late paternal grandmother, Cora, was artistic and fancy. She always wore a charm bracelet that sounded like bells and had very long, perfectly manicured fingernails. She taught me etiquette, quizzed me to see if I remembered the license plate numbers of all the vehicles around us on a drive, and gave me classic novels with leather covers and gold gilded pages. She liked silly things too, teaching us tongue twisters like “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a Bear” and telling us to be alert because the world needs more “lerts.” Grandma sang in the choir, wrote calligraphy, collected tiny Swarovski figurines, and kept a lot of interesting plants by her windows. She loved long-haired cats and made delicate Rosette cookies. No detail was overlooked—even the food on the dinner plate should be very colorful, and we should all learn to do many different things so as to always be well rounded.