81 posts tagged “purple”
While taking photos for the previous post, I spotted this cheerful view in the background. Left to right: Baudelaire, Clessidra, Elegant ribbed stockings, Push-me-pull-you, Triskell cable, Coriolis. I've got a pretty good wardrobe of handknitted socks now - there are several more pairs which aren't on the radiator, including the dissertation socks currently on my feet :-)
While doing the boring knitting of the red cardigan, I have been convinced by Frax to start thinking about the design of my next cardigan. I spun this yarn with a particular garment in mind, modelled vaguely after my favourite bought cardigan, and now I've washed and set half the yarn, wound a ball, and have proceeded with swatching. The pattern is a drop-stitch rib from Vogue Stitchionary vol 1, and I've now frogged back the stocking stitch to reknit it with some drop stitches incorporated to see how I like it. The yarn is lovely, exactly how I wanted it to be, and very soft, and I really like how it's knitting up - I just have to decide on a design...
Possibly I should have been warned by the fact that I'm a good way further on than shown on the left, but have taken no more photos - I take lots of photos of things I'm happy with. Current progress is to just below the underarm on the body, and about a third of the way down one sleeve - enough to start getting an idea of fit, and it's not good. The neckline is too wide. This can be fixed with a brooch holding the fronts together, but that then does slightly peculiar things with the rest of the line at the front. And the shoulder increases, as I feared, are not sitting flat but bunching.
So the project is now officially on the at risk register. And I'm going from here to Ravelry to search out a successor...
This is the end of my new scarf, finished today. It's much more warp-dominant than I was expecting, so the colour changes between the two weft yarns aren't as noticeable as I'd hoped, but it's very pretty, and much smarter and more sensible than the cherry pop scarf.
The finishing is a new thing I've learnt: hemstitching. All my previous scarves have had their fringes secured with knots, which are fine, but this is less bumpy, and the weft yarn makes it a decorative edge as well as a secure one.
And R complimented it without me even having to tell him it's new :-)
...and that the viscose pashminas I'd been using as scarves were not up to the job. Then I realised that I hadn't woven anything for me (the first scarf doesn't count, because it was just a trying-it-out project, and isn't up to being a warm scarf for a number of reasons). My next thought was that the Cherry Pop yarn which had briefly been a mini-cardigan was soft and warm and looking for something to be. So on New Year's Eve, I wove this. All 212cm of it, in one afternoon. Weaving is quick.
Weaving is also good for my stash levels. When I was just knitting, my stash was fairly well under control. Then I started spinning, and my stash started to run away from me: I had fibre to stash now as well as yarn, I was spending less time knitting, and - even worse - the time I wasn't spending knitting, I was spending creating more yarn. Which then went into the stash, sometimes never to come out again. Weaving, on the other hand, uses up yarn. Not only that, it uses it up more quickly than knitting, and in smaller batches - well suited to the relatively small batches of handspun I've been producing.
So the Cherry Pop is now out of the stash and into my wardrobe, and very warm it is, too.
Christmas presents from my parents and from myself (!) have given me new toys heddles to use with the loom, allowing me to weave finer fabric, and do some simple patterning, so currently OTL (on the loom) is another stash-busting project - a purple scarf (also for me :-) made from three different sock yarns - the semi-solid lavender Ripples I bought at Ally Pally, the purple CTH leftover from Clessidra, and the purple-variegated Filcolana leftover from Bellatrix. I'm finding wielding two heddles to be fiddly - it's difficult to get a clear shed (space between lifted and lowered warp threads, through which to pass the weft), so I've temporarily shelved plans for patterning until I get the hang of producing plain weave this way. When starting to weave it, I wasn't entirely happy with how the colours were blending, but then I caught sight of it while glancing past, when I wasn't thinking about it, and suddenly it looks lovely :-) The warp is Ripples, each end is going to have the CTH as weft, and the middle section will be Filcolana.
(The red flower-patterned
thing in the background is my ironing board. Almost never used for ironing, but often used as a crafting table - it's wide enough for the loom to rest against, and it's height adjustable, which makes warping the loom, and using my sewing machine, much easier.)
Progress continues apace with these, although they're quite tiring to knit, what with small stitches and having to hold both strands under tension all the time. I love how they look on the wrong side, and I'm really impatient to see what the right sides look like, for which I'll have to wait until they're finished. I'm more than halfway to the heel, and I'm sewing in the ends from colour changing as I go, to avoid it getting too untidy, and to avoid the possibility of finishing the knitting and then being put off by all the ends and never finishing them. I don't mind sewing in ends in small numbers, so this is working fine.
The second is a last-minute Christmas gift for R, which I partly wove in front of him on Christmas Eve, figuring (correctly, it turns out) that he pays no attention to what I'm making unless I talk to him about it. There are stripes in the weft - plain dark grey Jaeger merino and black tweed YSL - but they're much less obvious in the flesh than in the photo.
Next up (pictures three and four) is the finally-finished Clessidra. I don't think I'll use the riverbed sockitecture again, because I don't like how it fits me, but I love the socks and am going to wear them to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
Picture five is R's blue socks with a reknitted heel after he wore a massive hole in one of them. I think I've still got some of the blue, but I'm not sure where, and he didn't mind them being mended in black.
The last pic is my new sock project, double knit socks which I'm knitting wrong side out, so I don't have to move the yarn backwards and forwards (near side is English-style purl, far side is continental-style knit, so one strand in each hand, which is fun). The downside of knitting them this way around is that I can't read my knitting on the wrong side, so whether I'm increasing or not on any given row is a bit random but because I'm knitting them at the same time they'll match anyway so it doesn't matter, and I'm planning a short-row heel so there's no other increases or decreases to keep track of. I wanted to use different yarn to make it easier to keep track of which stitch belongs to which sock, so these will end up non-matching stripes - once I've finished the toe I'll break the yarn and swap them over, and keep swapping them at random intervals throughout (must remember to break yarn to do this, so I don't end up knitting the two together).
I've also started spinning the red leaf fibre my parents gave me for my birthday. I took some photos of this a week or so ago, but the colours were off so I'd been holding off posting about it until I'd taken some better photos, which I now have!
My first ever weaving project, in progress (made from Knitwitches sock yarn):
This is the next batch of black alpaca carded with purple merino. More than half of the fibre is carded now, and it's going much quicker with the drum carder than it did with hand carders :-) I've actually spun one batch of this, but I don't think I've taken any photos. It's about 5m/g, and will either stay as singles or end as two-ply, depending on what I decide to do with it. It's probably going to be another woven wrap, but at the moment everything looks like a weaving project to me, since the loom is spread across the library floor in pieces having been varnished at the weekend. I'm resisting the urge to assemble it for as long as possible, because I can't start using it for another week and a bit, so barriers are good ;-)
The grey-pink alpaca for my MiL's Christmas present is finally all spun and plied. The first picture is a closeup of two balls of singles ready for plying, and it's really just another excuse to show off the macro capabilities of my new camera! The second picture is of the finished yarn, about 500m of two-ply. I spent some time the other day swatching from my sample of this yarn, and I didn't come up with anything I liked, so this is starting to look like a weaving project as well. Of course, weaving it also means the finished item (a scarf) will be larger, since weaving uses less yarn than knitting, so this is solidifying into a plan.
