DesigKnit

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!