DesigKnit

The embroidered sweater is gliding smoothly toward the finish line (I’ll spare you a picture of its pale gray sameness). It would have been done by now, actually, had I not run out of yarn. I could have sworn I’d spun another small skein, but I can’t find it, so I must have wound it up at one point and not realized that I’d already knit it. I spun up a new skeinlet of about 250 yards yesterday, and now have a nice, medium-sized ball with which to finish off the sleeve and collar.

As usual, imminent finishing is causing me to scramble a bit to figure out the next thing for the needles. The mobius cowl is languishing in my commuting bag, so it may come out for a week or so to fill the gap and get some love.

I’ve also been short a spinning project for some time now. I finally got around to raiding my bin of shop seconds this past weekend, and came up with this:

That’s a pound and a half of mostly-Falkland in some mostly-related shades of green and teal. It’s destined to be a 3-ply yarn: one of teal, one of the bright green, and one of the olive green. (I think. I’m still a teensy bit on the fence about that olive in the mix. It will either muddy the waters or provide some grounding to the brighter jewel tones, and I can’t quite tell which yet. It may not make it to spinning, but only time will tell.)

The fiber is mostly semisolid, but there is enough variation that I might end up with long-repeat stripes like I did in the Blue-Eyes sweater. Sometimes I like that kind of striping, but it’s not really what I’m going for here. Also, I was a little concerned about evenly mixing the colors in the final yarn, especially since the teals are two different but related colorways. And so, out came the drum carder.

I broke the two teal braids up into foot-long segments, and ran them through the carder just once, alternating braids so that the batt is made up of layers of the two colorways. This should go a long way toward making the color more uniform, without losing the subtler variations in the hand dyed fiber. The bright greens will get the same treatment, and the olive probably will, too.

I’m spinning the batts as a very light laceweight single, but plan to three-ply them into a light fingering weight yarn in the end. This yarn won’t be ready in time to be the next knitting project, but it feels good to have something on the wheel again, after a month of it sitting idle! It’s also nice to be back into color, after quite a lot of gray. I do love the natural wools, but find that they are best alternated with something a little brighter, just to liven things up a bit.