Persistent Knitter

After going to my knitting group; and seeing some other Kauni that another member have (hi Janet!), I realized what was wrong with the other yarn I was looking at. It was too non-rustic. A heathery shetland yarn would be a much better match than the bright white, or bright cream that I was looking at.

A trip to my LYS today yielded these balls of yarn to try out. Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift in (left to right) Mooskit, Mogit and Moorit.

In a way I like the darkest one best; but think maybe it won’t have enough contrast with all the colors in the other yarn. The Mooskit almost looks like a light grey; the others read a bit more brown.

Any of them would work (except maybe not the darkest one); so now I have to decide on a pattern; how much of the background would I need, and then actually get knitting!

I have acquired quite a bit of superwash merino roving in the past year or so. In an attempt to use it up (and then get to knit fabulous socks out of it) I’m working on spinning more sock yarn.

This roving started out as two 4 ounce bumps; the colorway is Water Lilies from the Loopy Ewe ( here). Because it’s a duo, you have two strands of roving in each pack, each one a different color. In this case it was blue/purple and purple/green.

this means I had 50% of blue/purple and 50% purple/green. This presents a problem when you want to make a three ply sock yarn with even color distribution. I had thought I’d just split it all in thirds; but didn’t like breaking the green off so it’d be only in part of one of the plys. I have other roving from this same dyer; and found a pile of blue/purlple that matched that I hadn’t used yet.

Are you with me? I’m lost too.

Each bag in the picture represents one ply of a three ply yarn. Two of those plies will be blue and purple. (those are in the back of the picture). The third ply will be the green/purple. I divided them by weight +/- .1 ounce.

Because I added more roving to the pile, I will end up with 12+ ounces of sock yarn. I can normally knit a pair of socks from 4 ounces of my handspun. So I’ll either knit 2 pairs plus a small pair (maybe for one of my kids) or one pair plus something else.  Actually I seem to remember each bag weighing around 5 ounces. This is going to be a LOT of sock yarn :)

I acquired some Kauni yarn not quite a year ago. I’m thinking it’s aged approrpiately and is now time to knit something with it. The problem is that I don’t necessarily like the Kauni cardigan; and I haven’t found a project I want to even swatch yet.

This is colorway EF; which has dark blue, burgandy, dark green, medium purple, and so on. Most of the Kauni cardigans you see have the rainbow of colors in them with lots of yellow and reds and greens and blues and purples. You also use the same colorway, but shifting it so that you are always using a different color for background and foreground. I thought those colorways were a bit bright for my taste; so this is what I have (I also have another colorway which we’ll get into later).

I could use the yarn as most others have, and just shift the colors off by one or two; but the sweaters I’ve seen made this way with this colorway don’t have great contrast with each other. I could use a completely different colorway as the background; but the other one I have also has some blues in it, and I’d have to be careful to line up the color contrasts properly; and I’m not sure I’d like the two colorways combined.

My current thought is to knit some sort of fair isle-type pattern like a Dale pattern using the Kauni as the pattern yarn. I’ve done this for a baby sweater before using white and some koigu. (see blog post  here ) Worked great then – so I wonder if it would work for this. The problem is what to use as a contrast color?

From left to right, we have medium gray (the wrong weight, but you see the color); dark grey, black (heathered, but basically black), Cream, and White.

The black is too close in color to the dark parts of the yarn. When doing colorwork you have to make sure your background always contrasts with every color of the pattern yarn. The darker grey might work, but I think you’d lose the contrast with the dark blue; and it would be very very subtle. The light grey would work – but would the whole sweater feel too grey? The white contrasts well, but is very very bright; so not something I’d choose by choice as a background color (can you say “messy?”) The cream works well as a contrast to all the colors too.

For now this ball of yarn will live on my desk next to my computer until I decide to swatch or start a project.

A bit fuzzy of a picture; but you can see the texture in the pattern nicely even so. It’s a nice knit; easy to memorize and more interesting than plain stockinette.

Updated to add : The pattern is Copper Penny from this book:

I’ve hit the point where I need to split the front and back. The pattern has you do this back and forth from this point forward, but I just can’t stand doing colorwork from the wrong side. So – I’ll be doing steeks at the armholes.

They aren’t straight armholes, they do have some shaping so the steeking will be a bit interesting. My plan is to cast off as suggested for the armholes, but keep going in the round – adding 4 stitches for a steek over each of the armholes. The next step says to cast off 3 stitches on either side; but I’ll split that up over two rows as decreases instead of casting off. I’m debating if I should make a 3 stitch steek instead of 4 – saving a bit of yarn. Since there will be a open hole at the bottom of each armhole, there won’t be a question on where the steek goes and how far to cut.

In observance of my new knitting resolutions; I am knitting this sock from stash yarn. It also happens to be yarn that was already partly knit into another sock; but the sock was way too big and had the wrong needles, etc so I started a different pattern. The yarn is bearfoot by mountain colors; and the pattern is Copper Penny from the Handpainted Yarns sock book.

I also finished these socks out of my handspun:

I’m wearing them today and they fit wonderfully.

I don’t blog much anymore; picture taking sometimes takes a lot of effort these days.  A new camera might help with that; but I do have a few knitting related resolutions I’d like to document.  I have more chance of making these resolutions stick than any others.

1. I resolve to FINISH more projects.  I tend to start a lot of projects; but not finish.  I’m trying to get better about ripping out when I know I’ll never get around to it; and working on finishing what I have started.
2. I resolve to BUY LESS yarn and roving.  I want to work more from my stash.  I do know I’ll buy a bit (esp with a trip to Madrona Fiber Arts Festival in the works for February), and having joined both a fiber of the month club and another sock fiber club (only every other month) I will have my stash grow some. But I’m going to work really hard at hesitating more before I buy.
3. I resolve to knit more socks.  I love my hand knit socks; esp when it’s cold! But in the summer time I usually have NO desire to knit socks for some reason.  One of the clubs I joined for this year is a sock club and I’m going to work at combining #1 and #3 resolutions to work on this one and try and knit the socks up as soon as I get the kits.

That’s it. I’m not going to go nuts. If I succeed in my resolutions; I’ll have finished more stuff while buying less.  If not, you can all shake your finger at me next year.

What are your new year’s resolutions related to knitting/spinning?