Vest!

Close ups that look slightly less like a Dead Head convention was hanging out on our back porch

Stalled out shawl idea

I have a date with Barbara Walker to see if I can't design a nice shawl for my pumpkin Gloss and the orange beads to go with it. Maybe something with a frame design around the outside with a leaf design in the middle?
My crazy socks are nearly done, and I'll take some snaps of that yarn tomorrow, something that looks less Grateful Dead. I'm flirting with selling it, but I have so little time to do any dying and since I usually want to play, my dye lots would be so small and infrequent as to make me a poor source of supply, I fear.
Oh, and I'm working, slowly, on the Dragon mitten pattern. This will include instructions for child's medium, woman's small/med and woman's med/large. I wanted the pattern to reverse on the right and left hand, since it's pretty pictorial, but wanted to put out my own eyes at the thought of re-charting the second hand. That's what Adobe professional is for - I discovered I could rotate the picture on it's axis and flip it again. Only now, all my row and stitch numbers were backwards. I then figured out I could dump the pdf back to an image file, cut out the pattern part and paste it back onto a copy of the first mitten, using the right way round numbers of the original.
One small victory for the spacial-relations challenged and lazy! More tomorrow.

That dyed yarn, again

I haven't done this in a while, but I've been making mittens - with that dyed yarn. I have a basic template for a pattern and I throw together designs when I find something I like. I can post some on Ravelry, once that comes through. In the meantime, here are some pictures - here's my wrist-lined stranded mitten, and below is the inner mitten of a pair of lined mittens - silk and wool on the inside, wool on the outside. Labor intensive, but fun and REALLY WARM.

That dyed yarn

Eh, I'm not happy with my sweater idea - I'm not sure those colors would work. Or maybe not all together. I think I want them to be more intense. Something else maybe. Fech.
Maybe mittens . . . . sigh, things that match. Grrr.
Not socks tho' -- silk and wool is too fragile for that.
In good news, the stars is coming along nicely. I'm playing with using GoogleDocs for storage of my patterns. I've added a gadget, let me know if you try to get to something there and it fails.

Slow and steady

Haven't been away, or anything, really. I've just been plugging along on some stuff that's fun, but not real photogenic in terms of progress reports.
(We have been going biking on the Silver Comet and Chief Ladiga trails every day we can get away with it. AWESOME. The small one got his birthday present early, because, let's face it, biking 15-20 miles per day on only one gear just isn't as much fun as it could be. If you live in the area and like biking, I highly recommend these trails.)
Funnily, everything I'm working on is blue, or blue/purple/green. Summer I guess. Here's Soryu - I've finished about 600-plus yards (I measured them out tonight) and have about half the fleece left to spin. Nice, soft, good balance once I set it, but no spring -- but I want to swatch it, I think it would have a nice drape as a fabric. Maybe on 6's.
And here are the stars - slow and steady wins the race on this one. It's pretty fiddly intarsia, so about half an hour a night is all I want to do. I think I need to start the fisherman's shirt design -- I need some straight knitting.

Starting something with stars

I started work on the stars jacket. Not very much work, clearly. But I did do a some swatching, very messy and scattered (swatching intarsia is heavy going, I find so I usually do just enough to be sure my gauge won't be too far off) but that's been ripped out and I'm jumping in. Background will be handpainted, the star outlines purples, the star bodies teal and black. I'll take a picture once I have enough done to show how it looks. I'm still in this stop and go place with spinning. What is it with these weird stall outs I keep having?

Not actually shielding her identity . . .

With the small purple ball of yarn. Yup.
Still not happy with my idea for the hand painted.
Need to swatch it (is swatch actually a verb?) but I'm thinking hand painted background, purple outlines, dark teal stars.

Sounds workable to me, but I need to see it to see if the balance works as I imagine. The thing about this Fassett pattern is that this one is intarsia, which makes it very labor intensive - I guess in the best-of-all-possible-worlds, one would measure from the pulled out swatch what each pattern component requires, then pre-cut all the yarn pieces to the right length.

I'm just not that, um, careful (be polite). Nope, I do intarsia with each part of the pattern attached to a nearly full sized ball, and just shove the shaggy thing in a pillowcase when I'm not actually working on. Maybe I'll have a sample in a day or 2 to share.

I think this is better

Not much time to make a real swatch, but I think this works much better than the black. I'm still happy with the gauge, but I'm not sure how I'm going to distribute these 2 colors. I'll have to think about that.

The blue shawl is crawling along glacially, and the Matrix is 2/3 way through the second ball. I may not need that third ball - I like scarves to be hugely long, but maybe not so much with this one. The beads might make it too heavy, and I'm not sure a beaded scarf would be great for wrapping around your head - more like an accessory, really.

Testing testing

Still not sold on whether the coal and the hand painted go together, I've started a test of the cabled cuff, the pick-up-and-knit-off version. I like the cables as cables, I like where the join of the pick up meets the cable band; I think that part works pretty well --nice and even. But I'm not happy with the way hand painted yarn looks in cables. Maybe it's just too much going on at one time for my eyes, it looks messy and muddy to me. Puts me in mind of icky jumbo-sized afghans made of Lion Brand multi acrylic (not that there is anything wrong with Lion Brand). Next I think I'll do a test of the two color idea - straight stitch with a turned cuff and have the colors grade into one another. I'll keep both so I can compare.
One of the things I like about getting older, and this isn't the first time I've said this, is that I no longer think making swatches is evil or lame.
And this little picture is what happens to your pizza crust when you have to wait 55 minutes for a dental appointment.

Sausage

They say no one wants to know how sausage is made.

Sadly, sometimes one wants to share how they make it. And isn't that what blogs are for?

Here's my first draft of a pattern based on the swatch from the previous post. It's not quite human-readable yet. Knit from cuff to cuff with a big v-neck hole, plan is to go back and add a bottom edge and collar later.

Any suggestions? Or: Are these colors too light to go with the coal?

These pictures actually do catch the colors of this hand painted DK merino pretty well. Nice, they make me think of tropical water, mermaids, that sort of thing, but muted. I like to pair nice bright multi colors with black or dark grey for a strong contrast, but I think this solid coal DK merino might be too strong.
I'm picturing using this hand painted for a boxy jacket sort of thing, with interesting buttons and the edgings would all be knit the selvage, purl one row (or do a picot fold) and then knit up from this edge. I did this on the Northern Lights sweater, and now that I look at it, this would seem to be Northern lights in reverse. Maybe I should try a little harder.
I'm not crazy about cables in hand painted yarn, but maybe this is subtle enough to work. Or perhaps something worked from wrist to wrist, I haven't done one of those in maybe 7 years. That could work, the flow of the pattern could pick up on the changes in color of the yarn, really try and bring out the tropical water element. I'd have to alternate all three of the skeins I dyed to keep minor variations from showing up in the finished sweater.