Red! Shawl

Last winter I decided I wanted a brilliant red shawl. Just brightest red, no varigation. I did want some interest in the knitting though. I’d also been returning again and again to a pattern called Adularia which has a plain garter stitch body in wool and a deep, very pretty lace trim meant to be done in silk. I put those two thoughts together.

I had ~170g of palest fawn alpaca fleece which I washed, combed and spun, trying for a 4ply finished equivalent. This was back in January.

It came out beautifully and on target straight off the wheel, though it did bloom to become a bit boofier on wet finishing.

I dyed it with Landscapes dye “Desert Pea” which came out really well.

So, so bright and not blue tinted at all which is what I wanted. This is “my” red! It was such a marvellous contrast to the brilliant blue sky on the day.

Knitting beginnings. I didn’t fancy doing so much utterly plain garter stitch. So I introduced a row of yarn over k2tog holes every sixth row.

The silk was purchased from Colourmart, which is a dangerous mill end online shop based in the UK. I skeined off 116g (exact weight not important, I just wanted to make sure I had enough), scoured it and dyed it the same full strength Desert Pea as the alpaca. That came out a kind of dark coral pink, so I overdyed with food colours and very happily got something pretty close to an exact match.

Alpaca at the top, silk below.

Here she is pinned out for blocking

Such pretty lace and oh so many pins

The cast off involved a whole lot of little segments of crochet chain. I don’t really crochet, but I can manage bits of chain. I’ve done lots for provisional cast ons before but this might be my first crochet that has stayed in a finished garment.

Done. I’m pretty pleased with it. About a month’s worth of spinning, some dyeing and something over two months to knit. Ideally the alpaca would have been a little finer. I had to go up a needle size to get a fabric that wasn’t too close, but that is really a bit loose for the silk. I still really like it though.

On me. It really is my red!

Hmm. I should take those cloth masks down and put them away somewhere. I’ve moved on to N95s.

Starry Night Cardigan

A project of many firsts and learnings.

Early last year, I realised that I had not yet tried spinning fleece that was dyed with colour changes across the sliver rather than parallel. In between lockdowns, in May I was able to get to a couple of fibre markets and bought 100g of lovely coloured merino fluff hand dyed by “Ripples on the Pond” in “Stormy Mountain” colourway. In August I started spinning it.

I enjoyed the extra interest from the different colours as they appeared so much that I thought 100g wasn’t nearly enough fun. So I decided to try dyeing some of the white wool I had on hand to match as well as I could manage, or at least coordinate. The target was enough yarn to make a cardigan. For this, I learned to dye in the microwave after ordering some Landscape brand dyes, and then some more colours when I realised I needed different blues. I used the only white merino I had first off, about 100g. Then moved on to the kilo of ABP corriedale/suri alpaca blend that I hadn’t yet touched. Dyeing in 100g lots. Below is the best match I managed. The narrow sliver is the original, the wider fluffier stuff is corrie/suri dyed by me.

Some of the batches were paler by accident, some were darker by intention. Here is the majority of the spun yarn. Not all of it, I balled this lot up and started knitting before I dyed and spun the last of the wool needed.

Using two types of fibre was for two reasons. Firstly that I wanted to consume fluff I already had rather than buying more. The other thought was that the corrie/suri might be harder wearing so I would use it in the sections that tend to wear out or pill. For me that is where the inner upper arm rubs on the side of the bust and the tummy section where I lean on things; bench tops, tables etc. The merino is softer on the skin so I would put that at the neckline and the lower sleeves where skin contact is more likely. The multicoloured dyeing would hopefully mask the visible difference in the two types of fibre.

I knitted one pattern top down as far as the armholes and then found it really didn’t fit.

So I wailed a little, waited a few days and then pulled it back. The second pattern worked much better. Also top down but raglan:

This pattern is “Albini” by Orlane Sucche. It is designed for 8ply yarn. My yarn is closer to 5ply so I did a bunch of calculations based on gauge. I’ve knitted a smaller size than my bust measurement but with a full bust adjustment that I made up. There is a line of increases forming a dart equivalent running from under the collar to the fullest point to give extra width then some short rows to give the needed extra length. It worked really well thankfully.

The colour placement is almost completely random. I did choose the lightest ball of corrie/suri for the upper body and I deliberately dyed the last 50g lot darker than the rest when it turned out I needed a bit more to finish off the body. At a couple of points I joined on from a specific end of the next ball to give a smoother colour transition. Other than that, the colours lie where they landed. I like the effect.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the progress shots, we will skip to the end. Here it is with the knitting finished but before sewing up the pockets, blocking and dealing with all the ends.

Laid out to for blocking after a nice warm bath. Mostly I’ve just patted it into shape. The only tension is on the forearms which were a bit tighter than I wanted despite being knitted wider than the pattern (one sleeve knitted twice) and a few edges like the neckline and pocket edges so they would sit right. I was amazed at the change in handle of the fabric after blocking even without tension. It is so much more fluid now. This fluidity is probably enhanced by the long staple suri.

Here she is fully finished with label and all. There are a bunch of new knitting things for me in this too. First knitted pockets, first lateral braid stitch and a new kind of buttonhole.

A few friends said this reminded them of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting. I was delighted to find spiral buttons in stash to further that association.

I am so very pleased with the fit. Look, even fully buttoned it fits without strain. That never happens with ready to wear garments on me.

I’m much more likely to wear it open or with only a few buttons done up

Goth Tweed Cape

Back in May, in between lockdowns, a friend and I were delighted to be able to go to the Coburg Yarn and Craft Market. We had a lovely time looking at things and both came away with 200g of what we called “Bog Witch Fluff”. This was roving of black alpaca blended with many colours of silk by Wool 2 Yarn.

Once this was spun up, I dubbed mine “Goth Tweed”. Lovely stuff but very hard to photograph well.

After much deliberation I decided to knit it up using Suzie Sparkles’ “Aurora Lace Capelet” pattern. My yarn was only laceweight in parts so I went up a needle size to 4.5mm. This was a fun knit and a very nicely written pattern.

I added in one extra repeat of chart two for more length. I wanted the finished thing to go past my elbows. This meant I didn’t quite have enough yarn, so I added in a little black baby llama handspun to finish the border. To save yarn and give a little sparkle I added beads rather than knitting nupps. I bought the wrong size beads sadly. Too small! I persuaded them to work but it was a struggle and you can barely see them. This is the best photo I could manage. It shows the colours well too.

Here it is all pinned out for blocking in the sun

I found a delightful old button for the closure. Not sure if it’s glass or maybe jet? I gave it a scrub after this photo showed it was rather grubby. You get the grubby pic because I wasn’t able to get the camera to take one as nice later.

The finished thing folded to better capture the colours

Here it is on though the light is all wrong to see it properly. Happily it did turn out the length I was hoping after firm blocking.

Here are a couple of clearer shots of the garment taken selfie style with the phone.

I’m really pleased with it. For some reason, the fact that I’ve taken this from fluff to finished fancy thing in a few months has hit home and I’m feeling a bit clever.

Baby Camel Project

Mid last year as a curiosity, I ordered 100g of baby camel fleece blended 50:50 with silk from Fibre Arts Shed. It turned out to be beautiful stuff. Soft, shiny, slinky and lovely to spin.

It then took me over a year to find something to make with it. I found a cowl pattern I loved (Berilo cowl by Keka Guillén) but my yarn came out about 5ply/sport weight and the pattern was for light fingering. Besides, I didn’t have enough of it. Dilemma! After some grumpy stomping, I remembered that I had another 100g of commercially spun very fine laceweight yarn in the same blend, incidentally from the same seller. Ooo, could I make that work?

It looked like three strands of the fine yarn came close to matching the heavier handspun. So I swatched and yes, that works. The three strands is a little finer still but would work in the way I planned to combine it.

Then I pulled back the swatch and wound the fine yarn into three balls. Ready to go.

I figured that working with a slightly larger needle size would still work and I am not size tiny. My plan was to knit the fancy lower border in the handspun, then introduce the finer yarn worked three together and in alternating rows with the handspun, and finish with the finer yarn after the handspun ran out. This did in fact work well.

Here are the beginnings

and the whole thing straight off the needles. I messed with the pattern a bit to shorten it and make for a sharper angle of decrease in circumference. I am not blessed with a long neck. I also reduced needle sizes as I got to the last few sections.

and here it is pinned out to block.

I had quite a lot of the fine yarn left and it occurred to me that if the weather is cold enough for me to wear this, then I would want to wear a hat too and wouldn’t it be nice to have a matching one? I chose the “Burka Leaf Cap” by Lynette Meek. Again my yarn did not match the pattern, so size selection was difficult. I started with the small size on much larger needles, but at this point realised it was firmer on my head than I can tolerate. So I pulled it back and resumed with the medium size.

It’s an interesting design and a better choice for the soft drapey yarn than I realised. It’s lacey but almost entirely made of variations of rib. Lace within ribbing was a new thing for me. I didn’t block it so you just get one finished picture.

and the obligatory photo of them both on me.

I’m pleased with them. They function well, look nice, feel nice and I’m quite proud of successfully stepping through the pattern challenges. Of course I have no idea when I’ll get to wear them. Spring is sproinging and we are still and again in lockdown.

Seaweed Shawl

Back in early December last year, I decided to spin up some blended alpaca and silk tops that I had bought on a whim. I wanted something more than a standard 100g skein so I added in 60g of merino in lichen green and indigo blue left over from other projects.

I had a fancy to knit a lace shawl so I spun as fine as I could manage and over 5 weeks, produced 160g of approximately lace weight yarn. Really it was anywhere between cobweb and sport weight but primarily lace to light fingering weight. I was still pretty pleased with myself.

I liked the look of this but felt I might wear it more if I put it through a blue dyebath. So I did.

It was then saying “ocean” to me, so I went looking for patterns that also spoke of this. I settled on “Ocean Scarf” by Eunny Jang but had trouble getting the pattern. So frustrating! I persevered though and found the chart for the body of the shawl eventually. I knitted a couple of repeats of the main pattern and then reluctantly decided I wanted it wider, so I frogged it and started over with an extra motif. Yes, much better.

Yes that is a provisional cast on because I wanted to try my hand at a knitted on border. This was confusing for a bit but fine once I figured out how it worked. Very happy to have conquered another technique. I used a border called “Normandy lace” but expanded it to get a double zigzag to echo the main pattern.

Somehow I ended up in a very tight game of yarn chicken. I had kept records and calculated carefully but must have lost count somewhere. In an attempt to avoid having to reknit the last section, I swapped to slightly smaller needles halfway through the last border.

It was tense there in the last stages but I won!

Having thoroughly proven again that I enjoy lace knitting, I invested in a set of blocking wires which happily arrived a little before I finished. Here she is all pinned out, waiting for the afternoon sun.

I was so pleased with it that I couldn’t resist trying it out even before sewing in the ends. It has come out pretty much exactly the shape I wanted and i love the pattern.

I actually think of it as the Luidaeg shawl, but not everyone has read the Seanen McGuire’s October Daye books

Opalised gradient spin

A little over a year ago, I spun this yarn and wrote it up here: https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2019/12/15/opalised-yarn/

Much more recently, about 6 weeks ago, I gave this to a friend for her birthday and offered to spin some more yarn to go with it, her choice of which source fleece, or combination thereof. These are the two kinds of fleece. Rose grey alpaca and a merino/silk blend from Ashford.

My friend asked for two blends. One with a bit less of the blue mix and one with more than the original yarn. I took that thought, went a bit crazy and made 5 more balls to get a full gradient from one to the other. I had made the less blue ball, then slipped and bought another spinning wheel. To try out the new wheel, I wanted a simple spin. So I did some plain rosy alpaca plus some blue mix by itself. Then I went back to my lovely Suzie Pro and made the slightly more blue yarn. This gave 5 skeins and was the intended finish point, but I thought there was too big a colour jump between full blue and the next one. These are straight off the wheel except the original skein in the centre.

So, well, I was having fun anyway and proceed to make another blend to fill that gap.

Much better. This is post wet finishing. You can tell if you look closely that my spinning has become more even in the last year. Original yarn is just right of centre. I’ve also got better at blending multiple kinds of fibre during spinning. This original yarn was my first attempt at that. I’ve done a bunch more since.

I wound them all into cakes for easier handling. Right to left we have: full alpaca, 1/8th blue blended during spinning, 1/4 blue blended during spinning (the original yarn), 1/2 blue- one ply each of full alpaca and full blue, 3/4 blue- one ply full blue, one ply 50:50 blended, and finishing with full blue.

Here is a nicer photo of the finished set, given away as intended this morning. I’m really rather pleased with these.

Doubling Spun Colour

I’ve written before about craving colour in winter. Well I ordered 100g of this lovely stuff as a sheer impulse purchase. DHG 19 micron merino in “Champs-Élysées” colourway. Yes I know it’s spring! but i ordered this in the depths of winter, i just didn’t get around to spinning it until now.

Buying based on only computer screen colours is a bit dangerous. It turned out to be more autumnal than I had thought.

I thought I’d like it better if it had a bit more blue in it, and I had coordinating merino tops left over from previous projects. I was also pleased to extend the quantity. There is a limit to how many 100g projects one can make use of.

I came up with these two singles, both 50g, or half the original tops

These plied together came out nicely but felt like I had pushed too far to the blue.

So I thought I’d try something different for the second half extension and hope I could work both in together. “Thought” she wrote. SO much thinking. So many options. I thought I’d use just the blue and green with a mixed colour tops from stash to mimic the orange of the original.

Then I thought that including a little grey would come closer:

I spun this up and the second half of the original mix but with the intention of plying some of the original with itself for part of this skein. Original mix on the left, extension mix on the right. I then spun the last of the original mix on top of the extension stuff so I would get a little of the original mix plied with itself, having belatedly decided I actually do like those colours. Argh.

These two plied together gave the middle bobbin in the pic below. Big success. I rather wish I’d done all of it like this. I then went even madder and decided to try to produce yarn that would coordinate with the two bobbins made so far without using any of the original mix, hampered by running low on the blue and green tops.

Fun with multicoloured spinning from stash.

Here are the three finished plied bobbins. Confusingly, the first is in the middle, second on the right showing a bit of the original mix at the bottom, third on the left.

and as skeins. Overall I ended up with 210g, or approximately 650 metres of 4-5ply yarn:

and with the third bobbin shifted to the middle

this last pic shows the colours best I think. My camera really doesn’t cope well with blues. They don’t quite match but I reckon I could manage a pleasing sort of gradient using them all.

I am thinking I might try to use these as the front of a vest like garment in some way. Maybe. The point was really to enjoy spinning colours and I so did, but I’d like to use the yarn too eventually.

Little custom spin rescue

Remember the Midnight Forest Hat? https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/midnight-forest-hat/. It turned out that AdventuresInFelt was right and despite feeling wonderful in my fingers, it turned out to be too prickly for my forehead. I’m blaming the corriedale content. So, in order to be able to wear it I needed to make it a new edge in something non-itchy.

I’m in another phase of trying not to buy any materials, I have so much! I knew I didn’t have an exact match for the colour but I wanted to get as close as I could. I had some dyed black merino and some brown alpaca/merino tops that I thought might come close if I spun them together.

I’m really pleased with how it came out. If you squint, they almost look the same colour. The new spin is a bit thicker, which isn’t ideal but still workable.

It works nicely I think. Reads as the ground in the picture. Obviously I also changed the style of the edge. I wanted to use a bit more of the new yarn without adding length. I spun about 40g and used about 20g.

Another pic with it opened out. It does feel better on, though the weather hasn’t been cold enough to wear it for long. It’s ready for next winter.

Glad Rag

I tend to crave colour in winter and Covid lockdown intensified this. I really wanted something madly multicoloured to spin, but I didn’t have anything that answered and couldn’t find the colour combination I wanted in anything orderable. Then I made the Cabbage Coat  instead, which filled the need for colour for a while. Eventually I decided to order individual colours and make my own madly coloured yarn. All of this is from the recently renamed “Fibre Arts Shed”. Feltfine as it was when I ordered. Granite alpaca/merino and dyed merino in scarlet, denim, mustard, and mallard

This thought evolved into trying for increasing intensity of bright colours after starting with a neutral. Much, much thought, planning and spinning delivered this delightful madness. I’m pleased it worked pretty much the way I hoped except that the grey bloomed on wet finishing and ended up bulkier than I hoped.

I had always intended to knit this up in the pattern “Turbinado” by Sharyn Anhalt. I made one of those earlier this year but gave it away to a friend as a birthday present. The knitting started with the grey and I wasn’t loving it until I got to the fully coloured yarn. Suddenly I was having much more fun.

I was worried that the coloured yarn, being finer, would be too wibbly and not drape well. So I had my first go at adding beads to knitting. Happily the only beads I had of almost the right size were also a useful colour. I didn’t have a tiny enough crochet hook but I did have a tambour hook that was previously barely used.

I put two rows of beads a couple of rows apart from each other and the cast off edge. I also beaded the tips of the picots in the cast off. So cute. They look like little creatures. Ducklings one friend said. The beads are not obvious in the finished garment but they do deliver the drape I wanted.

Knitting finished and blocked, in time to use the last hour of sun on the back of my house.

A detail showing the increasing intensity of colour

Dry, and draped on the ironing board so I could sew in the loose ends. So pretty

The colours themselves were chosen to go with the Cabbage coat, though I think the styles clash rather. Never mind, I like them both, whether I end up wearing them together or not.

and on. It was so hard to manage the right light to show off the colours without overexposure at the same time as a picture of me I was willing to publish. This doesn’t do either really well but is the best I managed.

repeatery for linkage

Lacy red hat from white fleece

As part of my slow mission to learn by experience the properties of different kinds of fleece, I bought ~75g of Polwarth fleece blended with silk 70:30 as tops from Wool Chambers at last year’s Bendigo show. I got around to spinning it up a couple of months ago.

I was aiming for 4ply, which I think I managed straight off the wheel.

Then when washed it did what I’m told is the classic Polwarth Puff. I made that a bit worse than it might have been by the agitation required to dye it a slightly variegated red with food colour. So it ended up somewhere between 5 and 8ply!

and wound into a cake

It was originally going to be half a shawl, but it didn’t end up looking as well as I hoped with the other intended yarn. As it turns out, about 2/3rds of it has made a really lovely hat.

The pattern is the “Strathcona Beanie” by Megan Goodacre, except I’ve altered it to a simple skull cap shape. My yarn was too boofy to work with the recommended needles but I also have a large head. Going up to 4mm needles gave a nice fabric and a larger gauge but in a happy accident, delivered a great fit with the gentlest of grips on the head but not remotely tight. This one is straight off the needles and completely unblocked. I don’t feel the need and I don’t want to mess with the fit.