The colour of meadows

As part of the preparations for taking part in the Mystic Meadows KAL, I've been preparing some yarn. I wanted to use a non-solid colour of fingering yarn and decided that I would try to dye my own. Three skeins needed to be dyed at the same time, so first I had to get a suitable dyeing vessel. Previously, I've only dyed 100g at a time in the microwave, but this needed to be a bigger dyelot. Luckily, M&S are currently offering 7 litre stock pots at a good price, (stainless steel with a glass lid) which proved to be ideal. The idea was to create a range of greens to reflect my idea of meadowland, but the first attempt was a bit off colourwise. Very yellow-green. I had prepared three different greens, then dipped opposite ends of the skeins in each of the first two, followed by total immersion in the third. Something wasn't quite right obviously.


Realizing that this wasn't quite what I wanted, I overdyed the whole lot with blue, and finished up with multishaded greens, maybe a bit darker than I had planned, but still pleasing.


The swatch for the KAL was released today, so I'm all ready now.


The Tidal Wave socks are finished, I really enjoyed working with this yarn (merino/tencel) and the socks feel so soft on my feet. It's almost a shame it's nearly sandal weather.

Sometimes, life gets in the way of knitting

Having realised that I haven't written anything here for over a week and a half, I thought I'd better try. Blogging about not very much seems a bit pointless really, but this is supposed to be my fibre related journal, so I'm going to do it. It's hard to isolate the reason, but there are no FOs, nothing started, and only a bit of progress on Secret of the Stole ii. I'm halfway through the penultimate clue, and I'm finding it hard to keep enthusiastic about it. I'm past the heel turn and gusset decreases on the second Tidal Wave sock and on to the plain stockinette of the foot.

I've spun up a little of my mid brown alpaca, and spent some time this morning carding some more.

We're having a warm spell of weather at the moment, and I think Mollie has the right idea.