Knitting Like a Fiend
I sure have been making a lot of stitches on the needles lately! Finally it looks like I’ve finished a few things.
Shown here is a bulky hat/scarf set for the Ebeneezer Project (a charity supported by Threadbear)… destined to a New Orleans Refugee now living in the Lansing Area. The yarn for the hat is a variegated bulky from Rae’s, and I almost ran out of that yarn. I divided the remainder into two equal balls and then knit each half as a stripe near the end, of a solid eggplant Bulky Lamb’s Pride yarn I got from Linda at Little Red Schoolhouse. Both yarns are a single-ply bulky wool and it worked very well, I think.
I’m working on a second set (Lamb’s Pride Worsted), the hat is done but not the scarf. The purple made me more interested, the second set is a soft gray-green that is not my style and which wouldn’t take Kool Aid dye when the kids at Foster Center tried to overdye it in blues and greens… but it will be warm anyway.
I also finished a sample hat for Rae’s Yarn Boutique for this pattern I’m working on. Hers is in Debbie Bliss DK Alpaca/Silk. It’s like touching air, really! So soft! She carries the yarn so she can use the sample right away and I am finishing up the pattern as quickly as is practical.
I’ve finished the three skeins of yarn required for the sides of my Watercolor Bag for Threadbear. Unfortunately, after picking yarn, changing my mind and getting new yarn, knitting the “new idea” fully… well, I don’t like it. I’m not the only one, either, as I’ve shown it around and it just doesn’t work well. It is right now two different colorways of a Knit 1 Crochet 2 brand slow-color-change feltable yarn. I just couldn’t find a good pairing of colorways that I could stand to knit together.
The Watercolor Bag was originally designed for Noro Kureyon yarn. That yarn has colorways with sometimes a dozen colors of wool in one ball. I designed the bag to combine THREE different colorways (though many students have chosen two balls of one colorway with a different one in the middle). Because the Kureyon has so many colors in it, the change between colorways is undetectable most of the time. In fact, Linda at Little Red Schoolhouse has to go out of her way to convince people that I used three different color numbers for the sample bag at her store. It works well.
But this K1C2 yarn is much more controlled, it has very even changes from color to color, and in most of the colorways it does not have much contrast, is mostly similar colors near one another on the color wheel.
So I used a colorway that is not far from the Noro idea, it has pink and purple and blue… and I chose that for the top and bottom yarns. Then I chose a colorway in blues and greens for the center “stripe.” And the blue/green is almost flat, nearly no contrast next to the first multicolor. And it just plain looks like a mistake. Even though there is a color that is in both yarns, it isn’t enough to relate them together.
SO… I will cut out the middle skein, graft the third skein to the first with a sewing needle (I actually enjoy handsewing so this is no problem) and continue knitting at the bottom of the bag. Using three balls of the same colorway number. Hey, it’s pretty that way so I will not knock it!
Off to knit more on my gray-green garter stitch charity scarf. Good thing I totally love both my vintage plastic needles and the texture of the yarn I’m knitting.