Sock Pair #37

Wow, it’s the third day in a row that I’ve finished a postable thing. Today it’s my latest pair of socks. They were started back in May when I needed to quickly come up with a small traveling project. I found three yarn leftovers that went really well together.

The first turned out to deliver a lovely marbled pattern which was a nice surprise. Not my leftovers so I didn’t know how they would knit up.

I’m really pleased with the finished effect. The colours are so good together. I’ve blended them a bit by doing alternating rows for a while each time I joined a new yarn in.

another, slightly artier shot.

and now of course, I need another traveling project!

Indigo Vines Dress

Quite some years ago I saw a child’s dress in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove museum. Custom batik decoration, indigo dyed, and with an intriguing but simple cut. An Arts and Crafts movement piece.  I was very taken with it and it stuck in my head.

Then about 14 months ago I prepared a length of silk with custom stitched resist pattern, intending to make a dress inspired by this. See Indigo stitch resist experiment.

A month ago I realised I had a delightful excuse for a new semi formal day dress in the form of Christmas lunch. So I decided to make this up. I laid the fabric out and was about to cut but felt fuzzy headed and left it until a little later. This turned out to be a very good thing because during the pause I remembered that I wanted to embroider the leaves, which had not worked as well as the stem of the design, and that is much easier to do with the fabric uncut.

I worked the embroidery over the next week or so. The neckline and one sleeve edge is done in stem stitch with one thread of Madeira stranded silk. The other sleeve and the front hem are done more simply with just a running stitch. The fascinating background fractalish pattern is I think because I washed but didn’t fully scour the fabric before dyeing.

That done, I finally did the very minimal cutting out and assembly.  There is a little machining for the main seams but I did most of the stitching by hand. Partly in keeping with the rather labour intensive custom decoration but also to make the non pattern stitching less visible and let the silk sit well.

Here is the finished thing. By no means a close copy but very much inspired by. Amongst other things, mine is less full (limited by fabric width) and has added pockets. Sleeve edge to sleeve edge is selvage to selvage.

A detail shot of the finished neckline:

and on:

I’m pretty pleased with this I think. It’s loose and very comfy. A great dinner dress. A bit matronly perhaps? I was going to add ties to pull it in but it really didn’t want them, unlike my first go at a dress with this cut.  I think that might have something to do with the level of the waist cut. I must do a proper comparison of the two. I’m feeling I might make another of the same cut with a fuller skirt and with the front waistline cut angled downwards to allow for the bust lift.

Yes, I’m dressing like a Victorian child again. I noticed some time ago that clothes popular with middle aged women have a certain intersection with designs used for children. There are good practical reasons for this but it does amuse me.

Shetland Strawberries and Cream

Another spin, because I felt like it. My first go at Shetland wool. 90 something grams of this. I loved the colours when I saw it at this year’s Bendigo show and Shetland was on the list of things I hadn’t spun so there was no resistance to buying it :-).

Here is half as bought unspun, and half spun into a single.

Plyed and straight off the skein winder. Such an easy spin. Lovely loose fibre easy to draft. It’s come out a bit finer than I wanted. Near 4ply I think.

Opalised yarn

I am knitting, but it’s taking *ages*. I am sewing but that is slow too. So I’ve done this to keep my spinning hand in, test a thought that has been bugging me and also get a fairly quick little thing done.

A bunch of spinnable things were sent with my second hand Suzy wheel. The largest thing was ~750g of rose grey alpaca tops. I do like alpaca and there is lots of this. I’m not keen on the pink tone though. It occurred to me that if I spun it mixed with some greenish fleece, that might cool the colour in a similar way to green corrective makeup. I didn’t fancy trying to dye fleece without felting it though. Then I remembered I have some blue/green merino/silk blend tops from Ashford, 250g, bought from a store closing down sale, for which I didn’t have any particular plans.

So I decided to try spinning them together at about a 3:1 ratio. It went better after I separated them out into prepared sections

Still wasn’t a terribly easy spin. Getting the two sections to draft roughly evenly wasn’t easy. I liked the effect though, even early on:

I spent only bits of a couple of days to spin ~50g. Here it is plyed and straight off the wheel

then washed and dried

I’m calling the experiment a success. The finished yarn reads as a cooler colour. You can still see the original alpaca colour but the overall impression is pleasing to me. I’m loving that it looks sort of opalised. I’m not sure whether I will spin the lot up like this. I might, but I’ll see if I have the necessary enthusiasm after I’ve done some other things.