Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Liesl cardigan

Don't ask me why, this pattern never interested me much... until Barka came out with some yarn with long colorchanges, and I thought the wavy pattern would enchance it pretty nicely... But the yarn was much smaller than the pattern called for and though I did recalculate the whole stuff and knitted it until under the armpits teh small gauge was so slow progress I put it aside. By then I got the hang of th epattern and started to search for something thicker to knit it.
There was a bag of cotton tape from King Cole. I bought it a few years ago. when I opened the bag, I was surprised to find that it is not a simple cotton tape, but within the tape there are small bobbles in regular distances from each other. Knitting a swatch showed me, that the gauge is more or less fine, if I knit a bigger size, and the bobbles does not hurt the pattern... in fact the thing looks even more structured.
I've put buttonholes though the whole front edges, so I can decide just how many I want to button up.
Since the final fabric is quite loose, I used mother of  pearl buttons for backing.The hold the buttons so much better, than if I would try to sew them on the kitting itself.
The above pictures by Christopher. Below a couple of them the cardigan in action. I wore it at the knitting meeting in Kecskemet at the end of august. The pics were shot by Kato. Thanks :-)

And while we are at the topic of Kató... look into her blog ;-) I infected her....

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Left overs

A few months ago I dyed some wool with long colorchanges, from yellow through orange and red to brown, but at the bottom of the jars I mixed the colors there were some dye solutions left. Not all the colors, only a few of them.
So I dived into my fiber stash, pulled a bit of unidentifiable wool (might be BFL from the feeling of it... it came as a present with one of the spindles I bought on etsy), soaked it put it into an owen-safe glass bowl, pored the leftover dyes over it haphazardly, and gave it a go in the microwave.
Spun and plyed on the wheel... it was surprisingly easy and fast to spin it.
And started to wonder what to knit from 280 meters of sport weight.
Then one of the emails coming from interweave had a little booklet from the Helix scarf knitted from a bunch of different handspun.
Of course I like ma shawls big, my scarfs wide so I modified the pattern starting with more stitch and recalculating the short row part for the ruffled edge (turning at the 10th, 8th, 6th, 4th 2nd stitches at the end of every third row), and knitted while my yarn lasted.
In the August heat the only willing modell I found... was this little bronse girl, sitting on the rails by the river Duna.