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.

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

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.

Extendo Remodel Success

About two years ago I knitted a capelet. “Laced with Leaves” by Liz Langford Knits.

Really pretty but it so didn’t fit me like the image on the pattern. That looked like it came down to waist level but on me it very much did not. I am probably rather larger than the dummy in the pattern pic.

I only wore it twice and found it annoying. Very warm shoulders, cold everything else. I dubbed it the ‘Stupid Shoulder Frill” and started thinking about how I could make it more wearable, which basically meant longer. I even thought of just pulling it back and reusing the yarn. I decided to start by pulling back just the bottom border, but when I tried, the halo fluff got all jammed up and it wouldn’t frog. Instead I ran one of my tiny circular needles around at a nice identifiable row, then pulled the next row out half a stitch at a time to get the edge section off.

I had some of the original yarn left, with which I knitted another round of the leaf pattern with needles a size up from the pattern. That didn’t make it long enough, so I overdyed some merino yarn that was near the right colours but not quite.

Merino before

Merino overdyed with added possum/merino yarn

The resulting colours melded much better with the original variegated yarn. I also added in some hand dyed possum/merino yarn leftover from https://montjoyeblog.wordpress.com/2018/07/25/colour-coordination-win/ . Bonus, that hat should now look fine worn with this garment, whatever you want to call it.

With this I added a scalloped border and an extra band at the neck of the turquoise possum yarn to help tie in the stronger colours. Overall it is now about double the original length.

pinned out and in the sun to dry

I liked the extra weight of the beads in the edge of my last shawl, so I beaded this one too. Oh so many beads.

I am so much happier with it now. I suppose though it will go into the cupboard until I have somewhere to wear it. Ruddy virus.

This post was written with much frustration as I tried to figure out the new WordPress editor.

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