Some more about colour.

 

 

 

Recently I knit a blanket that seems to be taking over the world. I love it, and I am so glad to see that a lot of other people are enjoying it too. Before you get any ideas though, I already have plans to hide it before any visitors come to my house, because the promises of theft have been frequent. I like you guys a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

The prevailing theme seems to be that the colours, and how I blended them, are pretty great. Let me tell you, this is one of those cases where the yarn told me what to do and I listened. I have been in the Sock Yarnista club from Three Irish Girls for quite some time now, and so my stash is predominantly dyed by Sharon. In fact, if I removed all the yarn that either Sharon or Miss Katie made, my stash would be a sad collection indeed, made up of 5  or 6 skeins.

Having a lot of yarn dyed by one artist was helpful in this case, because when I ordered two skeins from The Loopy Ewe for Camp Loopy, those skeins took one look around my studio and made friends. It was obvious, even my mum spotted it. She quilts, and does amazing things with colour, so it’s not surprising that she saw it, it’s just that since we both saw it at the same time, it is proof that the yarn was in charge, and not me.

What I ended up doing was putting all the turquoise fingering weight yarn in a line, and moving the skeins around until they were lined up from lightest to darkest, and the ones that didn’t belong had been put back in the stash. At that point, I had 4 skeins. Zephyr on Adorn, Curiouser and Curiouser (Loopy Ewe exclusive), Bayside, and Moon for the Misbegotten (Loopy Ewe exclusive) on Glenhaven fingering.(Sorry that I can’t link to Moon, they seem to be sold out as of this writing.) As I knit, it became clear that Good Ship Lollipop (Sock Yarnista club colourway, available to any current club member) on Adorn was part of the mix too.

The pattern is Vortex Shawl by Kristina McCurley. There are a lot of projects for this free pattern, and no wonder. It’s simple to knit, but engaging enough to never be boring. I really like how the spiral is shaped on this.

I started out with Zephyr, and worked in pattern until I had 20g left. I then started alternating rounds with Curiouser, using a stripe pattern that would ensure that it blended well. When the Zephyr was gone, I just kept going until there was 20g of Curiouser left, and did the same thing using Bayside. To blend Bayside and Moon, I started at 30g, because the rounds were much longer by then. I used Moon up altogether, then finished the round with Good Ship. I knit one full round, weighing the yarn ball at regular intervals so I could figure out how much each stitch weighs in that yarn, and how many sts I could make with the yarn I had. I estimated consevatively because the last thing I wanted was to work a knitted on edging almost all the way around the hundreds and hundreds of sts and then run out of yarn.

The edging was worked perpendicularly to the main body of the blanket, over 12 sts. The last edging st was knit together tbl with the first body st at the end of each right side row, and at the end, all the body sts were eaten up, and the remaining 12 edging sts were grafted to the cast on. No binding off at all, isn’t that nice?