Oooo...pretty colors!

I've been messing around with the dyes recently, and having a grand time trying to figure it all out. I've been doing mostly semi-solid or tonal colorways, like these two.

Both of these are a combo of two different colors, added in various proportions. The purple dye in one broke a bit, adding some more variation to the batch. Both of these are on Targhee.

I've also tried out a gradient rainbow colorway, which was really fun to do.

This is on Icelandic fiber, which has since been spun up as a fingering weight singles yarn. I think it's going to become an EZ Pi shawl.

I'm going to redo the purple and see if I can't get it a bit less variegated. Thankfully I've got lots of undyed fiber lying around to play with!

I swear to Bob I'm going to finish a sweater this month

Sadly, but totally unsuprisingly, I've fallen a bit behind in my quest to knit 11 sweaters this year. However, I have high hopes for the month of August!

That is the body and back, and the start of the front of a manly man sweater. That is going to be for...someone for whom I started a sweater before deciding (with some input from his spouse) that it wasn't quite his thing and I should probably give it to someone who would appreciate it fully. Like my spouse, who has been making goo goo eyes at the thing since I started it, but that's another story.

This yarn was rescued from my abandoned Hurrication vest from the fall of 2008. Intended recipient is a big fan of blue, so I overdyed the yarn with some Jacquard Acid dyes.

I've blogged before about my previous attempts to dye sweaterlots of yarn so as to avoid dye lot variability. As you can see from the above picture, it didn't work out so well this time! So I separated out the various shades of blue that I ended up with and re-dyed the seriously lighter ones. I'm knitting the sweater alternating every row or every two rows from two skeins of yarn, in hopes of minimizing any major color differences. It helps that even the darker/brighter skeins have some variability as well. I don't think you can see a difference...

I'm loving the way the stitch pattern looks. When blocked, it flattens out quite a bit, but still keeps that wavey feel. I'm hoping to finish this up in the next couple of weeks, and get the pattern out to testers by the end of this week. Look for this one to be available in early October, just in time for fall knitting!

FO: February's socks

Pattern: Paul Attwell by Emily Johnson
Yarn: Knit Picks Bare, dyed by me
Needles: started with US 1.5/2.5 mm, but sock was waaaaay big, so the final version was knit with US 1/2.25 mm double points. I knit the 72 stitch version, to fit a men's US size 9 foot.
Start/finish: 1 February - 24 February 2011
Gauge: 9.5 stitches/inch in stockinette, 13 stitches/1.5 inches in pattern stitch.
Comments/mods: A total and shameless mimic of the Yarn Harlot, this pattern is fantastic. The stitch pattern is a 4 row repeat, with every other row being plain (i.e. straight stockinette or seed stitch). The pattern is really well done - great pictures, clear instructions (although no charts, but they aren't necessary). Since splitting the sock up by repeats worked so well for me last week, I did the same with this - with a four row repeat, it didn't lend itself quite as well to that technique, but I settled on five repeats a day. They languished a bit with the dyeing/starting of next month's sweater, but I got a lot done on the bus to and from Geneva over the half term.

I'm really pleased with how the dyeing came out. These are a birthday present for Ironman, and he liked the color of the yarn in the original pattern, so I tried to replicate that. I added a tiny bit of burnt orange to golden yellow, with a small bit of black to tone it down. Some of the orange ended up on the yarn in small flecks, which add a nice varigation (IMHO). I did my best to tie the skein loosely enough that there weren't any white areas, but there are still some spots that are quite light. But no matter - I like how it ended up in the knitted fabric. And look, they sort of match the Small Ridiculous Dog.

So now I have a breather of a few days to get in some work on Dad's sweater before March hits in full force, with Sock #3. Two months of 2011 down, two pairs of socks produced (plus one not in the club). Still on track, but next month brings the start of Sock Madness, in which I am once again participating (in a fashion). I'm hoping to be able to stay on track through that (I've got another pattern in the competition), but it may get a bit nutty in short order. We'll see, I guess.

A big pile of handspun

The River Run yarn, now dyed and ready to be wound up and cast on. I posted the exact dye formulas on Ravelry, but I used jet black, silver gray, gunmetal and navy to get 8 shades (one black, three gray, three blue and one other blue). Now all I've got to do is finish up this:

February's sweater for Devil. Should be done tonight, if I don't spend too much time winding up handspun.

FF/S/S: Merino-silk for Nana

I've managed to circumvent my sore ankle (for which I finally broke down and went to the physio - now I've got ankle homework to do and physical therapy twice a week...) and finish off the 8 oz of merino-silk that I dyed for Nana's Christmas present*.

80%/20% merino-tussah silk from Paradise Fibers, dyed using Jacquard Acid dyes (purple, violet, brilliant blue and burnt orange)
Spun/plied at 9.25:1, singles spun long draw from the fold.
Three skeins, at 397 yds/3.9 oz (1616 ypp), 297 yds/3.1 oz (1536 ypp) and 98 yds/1.0 oz (1568 ypp). I didn't measure wpi before finishing, but after soaking in hot water and rinsing in cold, the wpi ranged from 27-18 (in the third, overplied skein) to 20-10 (in the first two squishy skeins). I'll be using the two squishy skeins for Nana's present.

I was a bit concerned about the intensity of the colors in the dyed top (somehow I managed to forget a photo of the dyed top, but here's some of the singles).

The request was for a more apricot-type of orange, so this was definitely too intense. However, there was a bit of undyed top throughout, which managed to tone down the orange a bit.

Plying helped too, pairing some of the orange with blue/purple. I'm hoping that it gets a bit more muted in the finished object too, but we'll see. Note to my mother: you are allowed to complain about how bright the orange is as long as you still wear it!

* A present requested specifically, so I'm not giving anything** away by posting about it here.
** Final FO shots may have to wait until after the holidays however...