Just a quick note between packing for our trip (tomorrow) and celebrating our anniversary (today) to say happy solstice to you all. I’m not a religious/spiritual type, but I love knowing that this is the darkest it’s going to get this winter, that it’s time to open our arms and welcome back the light. Spring is a long way off, but the corner is already partly turned. For all that it symbolizes, I hope you have a wonderful Solstice.

Yesterday, I suddenly realized that it has been a week since I touched my knitting. I sewed some buttons onto the lace sweater on Monday, but other than that I had done no work on knitted garments all week.

That’s partly because my fellowship is ending in a couple of weeks, and so suddenly everyone wants the impossible from me before I go. (No matter how much you plan, it seems this always happens. I’m trying to remind myself that the important things will get done, and the rest…well, the rest will get left for someone else.)

It’s also partly because I’ve been spinning this:

That’s the first of the greens for the fall colors sweater, which is getting ever closer to being ready to cast on. I’m loving the spinning, and the colors are great, but I needed it off my wheel so that I could do a little bit of last-minute Christmas spinning.

Those little clouds of fiber are some of my hand-processed Gulf Coast fleece, which is beautifully soft and fluffy. The bounce in that fiber is just amazing. These little bits of combed top are destined to become a skein of yarn for a very good friend and beginning knitter who was with me when I bought the fleeces. I’m also hoping to get enough for a small skein to send to Shelley, so that she can see the yarn that came from her sheep.

Here’s a sample, spun up in a light worsted weight:

I can’t wait to spin some for myself! Of course, there’s a lot of carding and combing before then, but I think that seeing this bounce might just be enough to get me going on that project again.

And then, Branden gave me an early anniversary gift on Friday. I’ve been working on making my yarn finer and finer in hopes of one day weaving with the yarn I spin, but I’ve been having a really hard time breaking past the fingering weight range on my wheel. I can get a heavy laceweight if I really work at it, but it’s a struggle to keep an even yarn. I’m sure that some part of that is just my skill as a spinner, but some of it is also because of the ratios on my wheel.

Branden solved the second problem by getting me a lace flyer. I’m not allowing myself to touch it until the Christmas spinning is done, but I did spin a few yards of singles, just to see how much of a difference it made.

Even on the “low twist” setting, I’m getting singles that are much, much finer and very consistent. I might just get to laceweight in the new year!

I don’t know about where you live, but it has suddenly turned to winter here. The last of the leaves have fallen from the trees, and the air is taking on that cheek-stinging quality of a winter chill. We’ve even gotten a snow flurry or two, certain proof that winter is on its way.

Before we say goodbye to fall entirely, though, I wanted to revisit some of the fall colors in my dyepots. I know I can never get enough of these colors, and judging from the comments section I’m guessing that most of you feel the same.

One of the fun things about dyeing more frequently is how much it changes the way I see color in the world. I’ll be driving along on my morning commute, and there’s a new colorway around every turn. When I look at art, I notice more about how light and shadow combine, and I’m constantly looking for the colors within a color (is that a blue-brown, or a pink-brown? Or maybe grey with a hint of green and a tinge of orange?).  What’s even more fun is that it seems to be rubbing off on you, too.

My friend Carolyn is off on a great antarctic adventure at the moment, but she sent me this photo from a trip to Alaska, asking if I could make it into a colorway.

Do you see all those colors in the brown? There’s green, and yellow, and especially red in there. There’s the grey-blue of the clouds, and then the grey of the mountains, and the deep gold of the autumn leaves at the foot of the photo.

When I first saw the image, I knew that I wanted to dye it as a gradient, with all of those colors stretching from one end of the fiber to the other so you could spin your way from the leaves all the way to the mountains and sky. I laid the fiber out for a two-ply yarn, and then began painting each section. The sky was a combination of pale green-blues and grey, almost too faint to see on the white of the fiber. Then came the blue-gray of the mountains, fading into brown overlaid with reds, orange and green. At the very end came a touch of gold, mixed with browns to keep it from being too yellow to wear. Each section overlaps slightly with the next, and I used the same dyes across the fiber to make sure that they’d end up in harmony. I also made sure to leave areas unsaturated with dye to capture the variation in light and dark in the texture of those hills.

I also dyed a dappled version, with all the colors mixed together.

Here, the reds bled into the greys in places, which brought out a little bit of unexpected pink, and the whole colorway leans a bit more toward the gold (note to self: yellow is a dominant color. A little goes a long way). Both colorways have a bit more blue in them than the original photo, because I mixed in a navy dye to make the greys. On my sample cards, that mixture gives a very rich slate blue; here it leans a bit more toward a denim color.

(Since Carolyn is in Antarctica and can’t really check email all the time, she got to pick her favorite before I published this post, so the long gradient fiber won’t be in the Etsy post.)

Next, I started on a a series of inspirations from the Twinset blog. (You two really do take good colorway photos. I could keep going for months, just stealing pictures from your blog.)

Back in October, Jan posted a picture of the early snowfall that hit D.C.

The one on the far left of the second row really caught my eye. All those bright reds and yellow-greens, laid against the black of the branches and the white of the newly fallen snow. When Jan first took this picture, I said that I didn’t think I’d be able to get wool white enough for the snow. But then I dyed the Whitecaps colorway with the new Falkland fiber, and thought again.

It didn’t come out absolutely white, because red dye always leaks on the first washing. I washed the heavily dyed sections first, and then rinsed the whole fiber together, so the bleeding was limited, and I did end up with some sections of pure snowy white.

Then, there were two photos from Ellen’s fiber retreat, also in October (must have been a good month). The first is one that I’m calling Fall Reflections:

Unlike the other fall colors I’ve dyed, this one is tempered by a lot of grey and even a touch of green (look at the water, just under the tree line). And then, of course, there are the fiery colors of the trees themselves.

Again, my grey leans a little blue, and I didn’t catch quite as much of the orange as I was hoping for, but it is in there. This fiber holds almost the whole rainbow, really.

Finally, I turned to the last image in the same post, a beautiful photo of steam rising off of the water.

The contrast in this one really fascinates me. There are the black, black shadows of the trees, and the pink-white of the mist over the pale blue surface of the water. I also see a little bit of brown in the mist, just at the edges where it mixes with the black.

Here, I almost need a touch more blue in that grey, but this has to be one of my all-time favorite colorways, if only because it goes so well with all the colors I love. Last time I posted about dyeing, we took a few paired photos as an experiment, and it instantly became my absolutely favorite part of taking fiber photos for the blog. It is so much fun to dig through a box of fiber and see what goes together! (As Branden patiently takes a hundred more photos…)

Rather than go through them one by one, I thought we’d try a composite image this time (click to enlarge):

1) Alaska Mountain (gradient version) and Misty Water

2) Misty Water and Sea Green (links go to the original post for the colorway – all of these colorways are also available on Etsy as of this posting, except for the Alaska Mountain gradient)

3) Misty Water and Fallow Fields

4) Fallow Fields and Alaska Mountain

5) Fallow Fields and Early Snowfall

6) Fallow Fields, Early Snowfall, and Fire Maple

7) Alaska Mountain and Storm Green

8 ) Alaska Mountain and Red Oaks

9) Fall Reflections and Fire Maple

10) Fall Reflections and Sea Green

11) Alaska Mountain (gradient) and Alaska Mountain

We’re always more careful to get good color on the individual fiber photos, so it’s good to go back to the original post if you want to see the exact colors of one of the fibers. Still, I like seeing the two colorways side by side like this, and it’s fun to figure out what different combinations will go well together. Each pairing highlights different aspects of the fiber; sometimes a particular color is the dominant one, and sometimes it almost disappears. By changing the partner colorway, you get an entirely different effect. Look at the Alaska mountain with Fallow Fields (#4) and with Red Oaks (#8), or even with Storm Green (#7). You’d get a completely different yarn from each one of those.

I’m sure these fall colors will be back again one of these days. For now, I’m really enjoying this last little burst of color before we give in to the winter grays.

I usually knit one piece, pullover sweaters. The kind that don’t need all kinds of little doo-dads to finish up. You cast off, weave in the ends, block (if I feel like being good), and bam! Instant sweater.

It just so happens that both of the projects currently on the needles are a little more complicated than this. Both are cardigan style, one is pieced. One needs a zipper, and the other needs buttons.

The lace sweater has been finished for a while now, except for that critical part where I go out and buy buttons. Here’s a terrible picture to give you an idea of where it stands:

Sorry for the backlighting; unfortunately it’s all or nothing with light lately, and I decided that I’d take what I could get.

This weekend, we finally made it out to look for buttons, in a marathon errands-running session on Saturday. I have a couple of options that I think will work, and now just need to sit down and sew them on, and attach the grosgrain ribbon button band reinforcement.

In our travels, I also picked up some of these:

I had never seen them before, but two people in my knitting/spinning circle have been using them lately, and they swear by them. They’re little plastic bobbins, and you can wrap a few yards of yarn inside to keep things tidy while doing intarsia. Unfortunately, this weekend was too late for them to be helpful on this project:

But now I have a set for next time I am inclined to work with lots of tangly ends. (All things considered, though, I found it very easy to work with the intarsia ends wound as small skeins. As long as I kept an eye on them, they were beautifully behaved.)

Here’s the back:

We also picked up a zipper for this one, and I’m looking forward to my first ever full-front steek and zipper install in the near future. I’ll probably finish the sleeves first, though.

I’m also realizing that I need to start planning my holiday travel knitting. The sweater came with me to Florida a couple of weekends ago while we visited Branden’s grandmother, and I can probably take along a sleeve or two when we go back to Massachusetts late next week. But I’m thinking I’ll need a couple of other projects on the needles, too. Our yarn shop mission on Saturday was also partly a yarn scouting tour for another project I have in mind, but I didn’t find quite what I was looking for. I know where to order it online, though, so I might get it in time to take with us.

Other than that, I think a stash toss is in order, to see what might be hanging around in there that just needs to be cast on next.

It’s been a bit quiet over here on the blog lately. I’ve been working away on projects (more on those soon, but I still need to take pictures), and I’ve been plotting and planning about new things to come for DesigKnit.

I find that fall and early winter are some of my most creative times. The rest of life gets a little less distracting as the weather gets colder and the dark draws in. The fading fall colors highlight the passage of time, and another year ticks by on my mental calendar (I think it’s probably all those years of school that make my new year begin sometime around September). And so, naturally, I begin to think of things to come.

It was around this time last year that I decided to try a little experiment that has turned into our dyeing adventures here on the blog. It’s been an interesting year; lots learned about shopping carts and shipping, and about finding the right balance for me between Etsy content and general blogging. It’s been really fun to have you all along with me, sending photo ideas and squealing with excitement when I get a color just right.

I’ve learned a lot about making the dyeing (and posting) process work for me, without becoming something that I dread “having” to get done, and I’ve realized that I really do want to do more of it. I also know (and have known from the beginning) that it’s not possible for a handful of dedicated blog readers to find a use for all the fiber I now want to dye, no matter how enthusiastic and supportive they may be. (And thanks for that support! This wouldn’t be nearly as much fun on my own.)

So, finding new eyes for my fiber is first on my list of things to do in this next year. I’ve been thinking of various ways to approach this, but the best option seems to be vending at a couple of local fiber shows. I’ve been tossing this idea around since sometime last summer, but now I’m moving toward making more concrete plans.

This past year I have paced my dyeing to match the shop; not getting too far ahead of the amount that things are selling. Now, it’s time to start building up more of an inventory, so I can start dyeing more and stashing it away in boxes for the summer. There will probably be a dyeing post every couple of weeks or so; not much more than there has been, but I may experiment with a wider range of colorways for each day rather than limiting myself to my standard four.

I’m excited about the freedom that this opens up, to dye what I feel like and trust that it will find a use and a home somewhere. There’s been a similar freedom in dyeing for the Etsy shop; I’m much more open to experimenting on 4 oz of fiber than on a sweaters’ worth of wool, and I can dye colors and combinations that I wouldn’t necessarily expect to want to wear, because they will be perfect for someone else (and often, unexpectedly, for me). Sometimes more variation seems like a really wonderful thing.

I’m also thinking about revisiting some patterns that I have nearly written and that really only need polishing up. This is a tricky one for me, because I spend all day being very precise, careful and exact at work. Coming home and thinking hard about being precise, careful and exact in knitting isn’t always high on my list. But my fellowship is finishing up in a few weeks, and I may have a few months before anything else comes along, so this seems like a good opportunity to pull some old projects together and finish them off. I count at least 6 designs in my notebook, ready and just waiting to be turned from a tangle of charts and scribbled instructions into something more useful.

Then there are the new designs that are still coming. So many ideas, just waiting their turn. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble keeping busy in the new year.

What about you? Are you thinking of new year projects yet, or is it all holiday knitting this time of year?

I’m afraid I’ve been knitting and spinning more than I have been posting lately, and I am developing quite a backlog of things to tell you about. For tonight, I think we’re a bit overdue for an update on the Fall Colors sweater, yes?

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been turning this:

into this:

(Actually, I’ve finished all the brown, but I really liked the comparison of the original top and the final yarn.)

The Finn didn’t get at all sticky this time, and it has been absolutely beautiful to spin. It’s a nice fiber even when I get it wrong, but when I get it right, it’s amazing.

The colors also came out really well on this one. They ended up a little lighter than I expected in the final yarn, so I may have to overdye a bit at the end to darken it up a bit. I was expecting to get the balance shown in the first color; mostly dark with a few light spots for contrast, but it came out just the opposite. I’m working to come up with a design modification that will let me get around overdyeing it, though, because I really, really want to keep all those subtle color changes in the yarn. (I have been agonizing over this enough that there have even been suggestions that I should just dye up more fiber in a darker color and keep this yarn for something else. It is a tempting offer, but I think I can make it work.)

When I dyed this fiber, I knew that I wanted to match the original red-orange colorway. I used the same brown dyes that I had used to accent the red-orange fiber, and then added in a tiny bit of the orange and even a little bit of green. You can’t see it too well in the photo above, but it’s there. I was surprised to see how much that came across in the yarn. There are sections where one ply is a deep, olive green instead of brown, and a couple of spots where it lightens up almost to orange. I’m hoping that will help to tie the colorways even closer together in the final piece.

I used the same strategy for the green, dyeing it with the orange as a base dye and adding teal to make the green I wanted. Then, I threw in some dabs of brown here and there, and a slightly lighter green to brighten things up.

So far, I think they go really well together.

I started spinning the green at the Spinning Guild meeting on Monday. I can’t wait to see how it comes out!

There comes a moment in every crazy project where you have to decide whether to dive in or whether to save your sanity and walk away.

I had to stop and consider when I got to this:

which was really only marginally improved by becoming this:

But then, I have visions of this to keep me going:

Sanity is overrated.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a gray mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

-John Masefield

I grew up in Plymouth, MA. Land of the pilgrims, steps from the sea. The Atlantic ocean is a daily part of life there; you really can’t go anywhere without catching a glimpse of it here and there through the trees. The north Atlantic is a moody sea, a body of water with its own strong personality. If you live near it long enough, it becomes a part of your life, a character in your story.

When we left New England, I couldn’t imagine not living near an ocean. With the exception of a summer in upstate New York, I had spent most of my life not 5 miles from the coast. You get used to the smell and the sound; the salt air wafting in on a morning mist, people flocking to the shore in the summer. The off season has a different feel – then you see the hard, unyielding, and rocky side of the coast, the cold, biting wind, and the beautiful rolling waves of a winter storm. The passion and the fury of an untamed sea. Calm or angry, the ocean is unchanging, and yet never the same.

Linda and I were emailing a while ago, and she mentioned that she had seen a particular green in the ocean while out on a boating trip but hadn’t been able to capture it with her camera. She didn’t need to; with a bit of description, I knew which color she meant. I thought I might even have some photos of it myself, but we bought our first digital camera after leaving Massachusetts, so I have almost no pictures, except the ones held in my mind. Still, it got me thinking of all the colors and moods of the ocean, and of ways I might try to capture those colors on fiber.

Last weekend, I gave it my first attempt, on BFL and Falkland.

There is the color of the sea at sunset, waves lapping on a sandy shore. In the summer, sunset is the time that the locals head to the public beaches; the sand is less crowded and parking is free. As the sky turns gold, the water takes on a greenish hue.

In the winter, you’ll see those same greens mixed with grey on a cloudy day.

In a storm, the colors deepen and mix with a hint of brown.

The summer sea is a different creature; laughing and throwing waves lightly on the shore. Whitecaps dance across a sapphire blue, and children play in the foam. For this color, I made sure to leave long repeats of pure white so that those whitecaps will show.

I can almost hear the waves.

On calm days, waves rise up to touch a cloudless blue, and the water can almost take on the same color as the sky. The horizon disappears, and all there is is a vast expanse of blue.

Throw in a little grey, and you have the moodier color of a winter ocean. The water just looks icy cold, stretching out forever beneath a pale grey sky.

I’m not sure I found the green that Linda was talking about; the green of a sea churned into foam by the passing motor of a boat. I know which one it is, and I don’t see it here. There are an infinity of colors to be captured, and I think I missed that one. I know it’s in the dyepots somewhere, but I’ll need to sample more to find it.

I won’t mind coming back to these colors again, though. They do make me ache for the ocean, but it’s hard to resist the pull of those blues. I could wrap myself in any one of them.

It was really interesting to see the Falkland next to the BFL. BFL has a shiny, high-luster appearance, like silk. The Falkland is a more matte look, fluffy and soft, almost like a chenille or a velvet by comparison. We couldn’t quite capture the difference in a photo, but this one comes pretty close:

That’s Falkland on top, and BFL on the bottom. The lighting isn’t great, but you can see that there’s more shine from the one on the bottom. Personally, I’m in love with the squoosh of the Falkland at the moment, but that silky look is pretty nice, too.

A couple of people have mentioned the idea of sets of colors for the shop. I like to let customers choose their own mixes, but I usually dye several colorways at once, with the idea that they will kind of go together. I have a core set of dyes that I really like to use, and so those colors show up again and again in different mixtures and on different fibers. I’ve added links to the Etsy posts for colorways that I think will coordinate, and thought I’d show a few photos of these colors next to each other, to give you some ideas of how to mix your own sets if you like.

There’s the Storm Green and Winter Greys:

And the Sea Green and Winter Greys together:

These two are so similar that it’s really hard to tell that there are two, but that’s the Winter Greys on the inside. If you plied the two colors together, you’d definitely get a single colorway. If you spun them separately, you’d get a subtly different pair.

Whitecaps and Sea and Sky are the same basic dyes in different saturations, so they could easily be spun together:

There are so many combinations, and I’d mix colors differently depending on the kind of yarn I wanted in the end. If you’re ever considering two items in the shop and want a photo of the two together like this, let me know.

We also took pictures of my favorite fall colors roving today. It got left out last time for bad behavior because we just could. not. get the colors right…the reds were too intense for the camera. Today, we used a different lighting setup, and Branden managed to capture it.

Those fiery reds pair really, really well with the Fallow Fields roving that I dyed on the same day:

That’s it for my latest dye day. All the fibers shown are over on Etsy.

I received a box the other day containing these,

so there’s bound to be more color coming soon. I’ve even moved up to 8 oz jars for my favorite dyes now…somehow that feels like entering the big time.

With two sweaters approaching completion, I’ve been busily working away at a new design to take their place on the needles. The fall colors sweater is going to require spinning before it can be knit, so I turned back to the other yarn that has been waiting patiently in line.

I bought this yarn because I loved the vibrancy of the colors, but I knew it was going to take some very careful designing to turn it into something that I would wear. I wanted a pattern that would tone it down with a lot of black, but that would also highlight and flatter the colors.

My first thought was stained glass, but for that I’d need isolated blocks of all the different colors. Since they’re dyed in 6-inch segments, that would either mean a lot of ends or figuring out how to do something useful with stripes.

At first, I came up with this:

It would require an interesting construction, but I planned to knit the jacket from the outside in, so that the stripes at the edge could be knit in a single uninterrupted stripe of stockinette. I worked out the geometry for the front, and even put in some waist shaping, but I just couldn’t make the back work. I knit up 5 or 6 scaled down model versions to try to get the shaping to work out so that the back would lie flat, but it was just not cooperating. I’m all for process knitting, but I don’t think I’m willing to knit a whole sweater in a very odd shape just to decide that the back doesn’t work and rip it all out again. So, much as I like this design, it went to the scrap pile (at least for now…I leave open the option of it making a comeback).

Next, I thought about keeping the semi-angled front opening, but fitting it to a more standard construction.

I like the garment itself, but the stripes become kind of a design detail rather than the focal point of the garment. And I wanted that accent yarn front and center in the design.

Then I thought about other standard constructions that work with stripes. I could do a yoked sweater:

Or a raglan, for sharper edges in the color stripes.

I liked both of these options, but wasn’t sure they were the best we could do, so I kept sketching.

Bolero-type jackets do appeal to me, though I have yet to really wear one. Still, I like to play around with them in the sketching stage, in the hope that I will someday find one that I absolutely must knit.

I like the second one quite a lot, but I’m afraid today is still not the day for a short jacket. (But maybe that design in a different and plainer yarn. Olive green, perhaps, with chocolate stripes. Or a dark gray, with a mauve accent yarn for the stripes and button band.)

Or, I could use a fitted body with set in sleeves, and do non-standard striping.

I love this design. That surprises me, because I don’t think of myself as much of a horizontal stripes person, but I really like the way they’d highlight the shaping, especially if they’re not evenly spaced. If not now, this is a sweater that I would like to knit someday. But it’s high on the list of contenders for today, too.

Or, I could do one of those shadow-knits that are knit sideways and give a garter stitch striping effect.

I like the idea in principle, but I’ve seen a few of those sweaters in person and didn’t love the way they hang as they stretch with use. (I’m also not sure I have enough of the accent yarn.) Perhaps a firm enough fabric would be able to hold its own against gravity, but I’m not sure.

Then came the sketch that I lovingly think of as grandpa’s pajama top:

And I guess that’s all I really need to say about that one.

But there was something interesting hiding in there, too. What if I did a little nip and tuck here and there to add some shaping, and changed the neck a bit?

It’s a simple sweater; just a fitted body with set in sleeves. Couldn’t be easier, really. Worked the right way, the stripes will accent the curves, and should stand out front and center in the design.

But how to make the stripes? It seemed like intarsia would be the best choice. Just a solid stripe, a few stitches wide. I wasn’t sure what that would do with the color repeat, though. So, I swatched.

And I didn’t love it. The repeats are very short (only about an inch), and having several stitches across allows them to mix together more than I wanted. Also, it’s a pain in the neck to make a three-stitch-wide strip lay flat. So, I put it on a black background to hold it in place.

Still not in love, but what if I go down to a single stitch?

Now that’s more like it. The color segments are now a couple of inches long, and there’s a much more gradual transition from one to the other. Stretching the repeat out like this highlights all the beautiful colors in the yarn, but without letting it devolve into a chaos of colors.

Then, I thought about the painted warp weaving that I’ve seen. Here’s an example from Daryl Lancaster’s collection, which I saw in person in my class at Rhinebeck:

The effect is achieved by dyeing two separate warps (the threads that go lengthwise along the fabric), and then shifting them relative to one another so that the color repeats are offset.

I found the full color repeat of the yarn (about 3 yards), and laid out 6 strands next to one another. Then I lined them up so that I liked the colors that ended up next to one another. I marked the strands, and began knitting them into a black background.

You can see here that I had two different sets of color repeats, in groups of three. In each group, the two outer stripes change together, and the inner one is on a different repeat. After seeing this swatched up, I think I’d prefer it if all the stripes change at the same time for this yarn. But I can imagine lots of things that you could do with this general idea, especially in more subtly-shifting colors with a foreground and a background that can be offset.

I also played with the spacing of the stripes. I started out with three stitches between them, then reduced to two, then to one. I had intended to do my shaping in the wider black areas between the stripes, but I actually like the way this looks, so I may do some shaping in between, too. If I do keep the stripe spacing constant, I like the single-stitch spacing the best.

I love the way the reverse side looks, too. So nice and neat. All the intarsia wraps line up, and create “vertical purl stitches” as Branden put it.

I think this may be it.

I’ve said before that I’m not very good at the artistic arrangement of stripes, so I’ve been doing due diligence on Google image search trying to find a pattern that will work here. I’m not stuck on groups of three, and actually I’m thinking that a more random arrangement will probably work better. I’ll also need to decide where to put the color repeats in the garment (neon pink on the bust shaping, or at the waist? Don’t want that to end up in the wrong place by mistake…), but I think this could work well.

And if not, I suppose I can always fall back to the fitted sweater with the horizontal stripes. I really like that one as well. So many options. And none of them take all that much of the accent yarn, so I suppose I could always make more than one…

(This is how I end up with more designs than I will ever knit. Every project creates 6 more sketches I really want to try.)

Branden was out of town for work this weekend, which left me to my own devices. An empty calendar meant that I was free to play with fiber for two whole days.

It’s not unusual for me to have a lot of fiber time on the weekends, but this time I went even further. The house was not cleaned, I survived on scrambled eggs and whatever leftovers I could find in the fridge, and pretty much nothing got done except fibery things. That is very unusual. It’s probably been a year since my last do-nothing-but-what-I-feel-like-at-the-moment weekend.

And I felt like playing with fiber. On Saturday, I made color:

We’ll take some decent pictures this weekend, and I’ll tell you all about them then. But for now, look at the pretty blue-greens!

On Sunday, I made more color:

Those are the browns and greens for the fall colors sweater. I hope. They hadn’t dried yet when I took the photo, but I think the colors came out all right to match the red/orange colorway.

I had forgotten how much work it is to dye large quantities, and how much dye it takes. That was some thirsty fiber! I made more dye than I thought I’d need, and then I went back and made twice as much again. I even ran out of two colors in the process, which just doesn’t happen in my overstocked studio. Never fear, though – there is more on order. (And it turns out it’s a lot cheaper to buy the 8 oz tubs of dye than the 1/2 oz jars…I will never run out again!)

Ironically, I realized while calculating how much fiber to dye that I am probably going to have a lot of extra yarn for this sweater if I use the current design. I dyed a few ounces more than I expect to need in each color (better to be safe than sorry), and with a colorwork body I will probably have extra of the red/orange, too. I think I’m ok with extra yarn, though.

I’ll probably hold aside 4 oz of the brown and green, and post them to the shop if I end up not needing them for the sweater. That puts me at risk for another sweater of going back and spinning more, but I think I’ll make it without using up the buffer. I guess we’ll see how the yardage is adding up when I spin it. I am very pleased with how evenly the colors are distributed on the fiber, so I should get fairly even “dyelots” between skeins when it’s spun up.

Unfortunately, it takes forever for wool to cool after dyeing. After I apply the dye, I bundle the fiber in plastic wrap and steam it in the dyepots for 30-40 minutes. Then the pots need to cool. Slowly. Without being disturbed. I usually leave them overnight and rinse in the morning. If I finish dyeing by 1 or 2, I can sometimes get the rinsing in before bedtime, but it takes a very long time for the wool to cool completely. The only times that I have felted fiber is when I rush this step, and it is very hard not to rush this step. (You can’t see the colors until you take the fiber out to rinse, and it is very hard not to peek at the colors.)

Finn appears to be especially finicky in this regard; I have only mildly felted roving once in my dyeing career, except for Finn. I lose at least one colorway each time I dye, it seems, even when I treat the Finn exactly the same as all the other fibers that I dye in the same batch. Of course, what I call felted isn’t unusable. It’s more pre-felted, I guess.  The individual fibers don’t really stick to each other; they just get a little coarser, and sometimes catch a tiny bit while drafting. I suspect that the scales have started to open up, but that the actual felting hasn’t begun. It’s usually just a tiny bit around the very outside layer, but it’s enough of a difference that I won’t sell that roving, and it gets put aside for future use. (It also happens to mean that my private stash of Finn is doing quite well, which I suppose is a plus.)

Since I didn’t want a huge addition to the slightly pre-felted Finn collection, I left the dyepots overnight (I didn’t even open the lid to peek!) and snuck in a few minutes at lunchtime today to rinse the fiber. I finished dyeing at 3:00 yesterday afternoon, and I thought I could still feel a tiny bit of heat in the very center of the bundles today at noon. Wet wool is a good insulator indeed.

I’m itching to get started on the spinning, just as soon as the fiber finishes drying. Our basement dehumidifier does a pretty good job, so it should be done by tomorrow.

Since I need to get back to spinning for the fall colors sweater, I started looking about for another project to put on the needles next. I’ve begun sketching and swatching for a sweater from the yarn I bought at Stitches:

I am very excited about that, but it’s enough to be a whole ‘nother post, so we’ll get to that later.

The second sleeve of the Falkland sweater is halfway complete, and I finished charting it out so that I can use this sleeve to test the increase section.  It’s like real documentation…scary thought indeed.

And then, last night I began winding a warp for the next project to go on the loom. About halfway through, I realized that I’m going to run out of yarn. This really surprised me; all of my previous experience suggests that cones are magically endless sources of yarn. But not this time. Looks like I’ll need to order more before I can get any further on that project.

Turns out I got a lot done for a weekend of doing absolutely nothing. Now I just need to catch up on that cleaning…