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.

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.

Felted Pot Holders

I found myself in need of a pair of pot holders and I felt like doing a bit of simpler knitting. Realising that this was a good project to use some of my early handspinning made me even more keen.

Bits and pieces of handspun yarn dating back to 2015. I used some of this and added in a few other bits. Some I dyed blue, but I didn’t use the bluest yarn in the picture! .

I had a few goes at making up a pattern but wasn’t happy so that all got pulled back and instead I followed “Easy Pot Holders” by Junko Nakada. That went so much better. I started with a couple more stitches per side because my yarn was thinner than called for in the pattern. The neat two row colour arrangements are deliberate but the softer changes are random. Random they may be but I’m very happy with where those colours landed.

Then I popped them in with a load of laundry to felt so they would be thicker and better at insulating. A short and slightly nervous wait before I could see how they came out but I didn’t fancy felting them by hand. Happily they are fine and pretty much exactly what I wanted. Now to hope they don’t get eaten by moths. If I use them often they should be ok I think. The kitchen is about the lightest room in the house which clothes moths don’t like, and they haven’t eaten my woolen double ended pot holder that I made years ago.

A couple more pictures to show before and after sizing. They only shrank 10% in width which was less than I expected.

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.

Lacey Ponchigan

A bunch of handspun yarn from last year forming a nice ombre. All natural coloured except possibly the grey.

It begins. Yes, this is working.

Three quarters done. Getting bored with the knitting but can’t stop now. Bonus evidence of lockdown online shopping.

One half blocked, one half not. A lovely example of what wet blocking can do.

All finished. Two rectangles seamed in back and sides. One button. Pattern is “Shaina” by DanDoh/Yumiko Alexander.

And on. Sexy squares. I like it. I did add some rows in the middle section but I wish I’d added more. Never mind, it still works.

The colours weren’t specially chosen to go with this dress but it looks like they might have been.

Spun Colour Vest

Last October I spun this colourful yarn, written up here https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/doubling-spun-colour/

I had been thinking it would be nice knitted up as the front of a vest. Turns out there was nearly enough for a whole vest. I got it into my head that I wanted the original colourway nearest my face, which made finding a pattern more difficult than it should have been. In the end I used a bottom up, seamed pattern (Inez by Emily Nora O’Neil) but made a bunch of changes. I started at the base of the neckline with a provisional cast on, knitted down or backwards for a bit to get a feel for how far the yarn would go.

I put this picture in because of all the ones I took, it shows the colours most accurately.

Then I went back and knitted the front shoulders, introducing some brown merino/alpaca handspun to make up the balance of the needed yarn. Then I returned to knitting backwards to finish the front, introducing the the second colourway and knitting the two in alternating two row blocks until the first ran out.

I changed the position of the body shaping from the side seams to two vertical lines below the bust points. I also widened the body from underarm level for better fit. The back was knitted in the more standard bottom up way. The third colourway got introduced when the plain second colourway matched the height it was in the front.

Eventually I finished both pieces and blocked them. Even after all the thinking and planning about colour placement, i’d do it differently if I was starting over, but this is appealing enough as is.

Then I got the seams sewn. All good. Then it was time to to the borders on the neckline and armholes. I had one attempt, failed and got scared of that. Roadblock hit in January, I put this away and knitted two whole projects before I felt brave enough to deal with it. Last Saturday i swore I’d not start another knitting project until this one was finished, and I wanted to knit, so I just had to do it. After all that procrastination and feeling offput, it wasn’t even that hard. I did all the borders yesterday afternoon and evening. The borders are quite minimal, just a thin line, but they serve well to smooth and stabilise the edges. I had been worried that the armholes were too deep, but the border sorted that problem out.

Here is a pic that shows how the brown hem and shoulders are worked to join to the coloured yarn in a way that looks like it was designed that way, which I suppose it was.

Here is the obligatory picture of it on me. I wasn’t in much of mood to smile at the camera but I do like my new vest really.

That’s one lot of handspun turned into a wearable thing. Now I get to embark on a new knitting project.

Procrastascarf

My goodness. It’s over three months since I posted here. Oops. I knew it had been a while. Do I remember how to do this?

All through winter I was keen on figuring out a design for a jumper out of this big stack of hand spun yarn.

However, said design was elusive. I couldn’t settle on anything particular. Then I found a tentative plan for just the fawn and grey, with a pattern and everything. This released the coloured yarn for other projects. I’ve been wanting a red scarf, these three small red balls form a pleasing gradient and a pattern presented itself with ease. I have a hat already in the middle tone which is polwarth with silk. https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2020/07/02/lacy-red-hat-from-white-fleece/. The darkest is merino bought years ago and written up here https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/extracting-the-good-stuff/. The palest is also merino, fleece given to me by friend Holly about a year ago, spun up and dyed with food colour.

The pattern (Mini Solution Scarf by Kelene Kinnersly) is for a triangular scarf, so I started with the smallest ball to get the most even apparent sized segments.

Then I knitted some during a Zoom meeting and made mistakes I didn’t want to live with. Frog and reknit.

There was only 110g all up and on 6mm needles it knitted up really fast. Here it is unblocked:

and all pinned out on a lovely big piece of cardboard that I saved from a moving box 15 years ago and had forgotten about. See, I knew such a big piece was worth saving for something!

The pattern is a good one for using up nearly all the yarn. Here are my leftovers

and here is the scarf all freshly blocked, dry and being modeled, on a day rather too hot for it.

It’s a procrastascarf, because what I really should have been working on is the edgings on a vest. I’d had one go and failed by making the neck edge way too tight. I just wanted to knit something easy, so I did. Now I’ve started a lace shawl. I really must have another go at those edges.

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.

One for me

Last year, as the culmination of my Alpaca goodness project I knitted a version of Joji Locatelli’s “3-colour cashmere cowl”, written up here. That was a gift for friends and I wanted one of my very own. I’ve loved the look of this pattern for ages.

I’d been fancying these colours together:

The off white is 50:50 extra fine merino and baby alpaca. I can’t remember the seller but it was bought at a fibre muster in I think Gerringong a few years ago. The blue is this yarn bought as an absolute bargain from Skeinz factory outlet in Napier NZ, which i had to figure out how to wind into a workable form and then dyed with indigo.

The caramel is left over from the Alpaca goodness project, though the small hank pictured turned out to be too thick to work with the other two but I gleaned little bits of other leftovers from mostly the same creature. I think I ended up with five different little sections of yarn spliced together to make up barely enough of the caramel element, and then had a win with the last one running out just after the end of a round and the end of a pattern repeat! Yarn chicken win!

Here is the finished cowl straight off the needles

and then blocked

and here are a couple of pics of it on. Soft and warm and interesting.

Alpaca Scarf- Suri + Huacaya, gradientesque.

I wanted to “do” something with the suri alpaca yarn discussed here. There wasn’t very much of it though, so it needed boosting. Ah, I had a small amount of fairly coordinating grey huacaya alpaca yarn from the alpaca adventures of last winter.  These two:

I thought the shiny of the suri wanted a knit faced pattern. I decided on a pattern called “Favourite Scarf Ever” by Lisa Bruce, a free pattern on Ravelry.  I split every thing in two as called for by the pattern. Each side is knitted separately and then grafted together. I was worried that my limited yarn would not give enough length, but blocking delivered, hugely. The huacaya yarn is much softer and nicer to the touch so the central position serves both visual design and comfort.

Here is the finished scarf straight off the needles:

and after wet blocking:

Silly me forgot to take measurements before, but I hope you can see that a lot more length as well as stitch definition and drape was achieved in the blocking. It’s now about the minimum length I would hope for in a linear scarf. I’m a bit annoyed that is now obvious that my attempts to make a gradient of colour in the suri failed a bit. The dye did not fully penetrate the locks, so there was a variable amount of white blended in with the colour. That’s my reasoning anyway. Oh well, this is still a pretty thing.

Here is a pic of the ends to show the pattern in better detail:

and a couple of it on me: