Knitting with Rainbows: a different kind of book review

Knitting with rainbows: making the most of gradient yarns, by Carol Feller. Available through Ravelry, or at Carol's website.

The knitting content on this blog hasn't been exactly stellar over the last few years - long days, much travel and the advent of Twitter are probably responsible - but the book reviews have carried on.  Today, a combination of the two!

I've been enthralled by the number of dyers who've started to produce gradient sets over the last few years; and the very different definitions of gradients - some sets start at one point in the colour wheel and move to another; some are different intensities of the same colour; and everything in between.  Some have four colours, some 6, some up to 15... Some come as mini-skeins, some as a single graduated skein.

When I was doing embroidery City and Guilds, I had a couple of sessions with Jean Littlejohn; and she used to joke that she did Mulberry Silks therapy.  This consisted of standing next to a stitcher staring helplessly at a perfect, unopened pack of colourful threads, and intoning Open The Packet... Use The Thread.... And I've felt slightly similar with the gradient packs I've bought.

So this book is extraordinarily topical, and welcome.

There are eleven lovely projects; the one on the cover particularly attracts me; and this pair of long, long handwarmers is beautiful.  There are cowls, and hats, and scarves, wraps and shawls of different shapes, at least half a dozen of which I'd love to make.  In many cases there are two versions of the pattern made with different gradient sets, giving a completely different effect.

This is way more than a book of patterns, though; which is what I love about it.  There's a lot of excellent practical information which helps a knitter lose the slight apprehension which comes with something which looks so perfect in the packet you don't really want to take the skeins out of the bag.

There's advice (and a table! Love tables...) on which techniques might go best with which type of gradient, and on what to do when your gradient set has a different number of colours or different yardage to the ones in a given pattern.  And the fun idea of creating your own gradient sets out of leftovers, sometimes by doubling up the yarn to give the effect you want.

At the back, there's also information on joining those pesky mini-skeins, combining gradient packs for larger projects, and how to break up the sets in different ways.  And there's a short bibliography (which makes my librarian's heart glad...).

Full disclosure: I was sent the eBook version for this review. It's a book I would willingly buy, and think is excellent value both for the patterns and for the number of ideas and the inspiration Carol gives to the reader.

Carol's running a KnitALong for patterns from this book over on Ravelry; so now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to drool anew at my Sparkleduck gradient set, and ponder what to cast on...

NaBloPoMo day 22: Naming of parts

The daily blogging being completely blown, at least I can show you what I've been doing with another of this month's tasks - the NaKniSweMo cardigan.

I have pieces.  All the pieces, in fact...

From top to bottom, two sleeves, two fronts and a back.  The colour's actually a pale cool grey, but this is how it looks on the chair by the PC in the lamplight...

Having these sorted by the 22nd is great; but I'd really like to get the bands picked up and finished tomorrow, because it's too big to carry to work and back...

That's 76,692 stitches, at my best calculation...

NaBloPoMo day 12: Nearly halfway. Ish.

So, other than attempting to blog every day, one of the other things I'm trying to do this month is knit a sweater.  Or in this case, a cardigan.

As of last night, I had a back, a sleeve and the ribbing for another sleeve.  In theory, that means I'm halfway. In practice, there's all the sewing up and picking up for bands to do, and that's a real pig. On the other hand, if I were knitting in one piece from the top down, it would long ago have got to the stage where I'd have to be hauling a backpack around, so the sewing up is a necessary evil.

It's not the most exciting garment in the world; but here it is so far.

The gory details of the pattern, yarn etc. are in Day 1's post so I won't repeat them here.  This represents 39,524 stitches, at nearest reckoning; onwards with the fronts now, with the second sleeve as knitting-group knitting as it needs very little concentration...

Yackety yak

I had all sorts of plans for practical and knitting things I was going to do today; and here I am, at 5pm, the world outside dark and none of them done...

The day got off to a slow start when I realised I'd not set the heating to come on; so I got up, switched that on, made a cuppa and took it back to bed to listen to the Test match (hurrah for Alastair Cook and Matt Prior, I say...)  Two hours later...  Ah well.

The other distracting factor was the unexpected entry of yak down into my life. My visitors yesterday arrived bearing gifts; including some rather gorgeous yarn containing yak...  It looked at me as soon as I got it out of the bag last night, and quite clearly said Fingerless mittens in geometric slip-stitch, please.  Which was a little weird, but it had, after all, come from a household which includes talking sock yarn and a delinquent sheep...

So today I went looking for a stitch pattern I had in the back of my head - and actually found it first time, which never happens.  It was given as written instructions (not my favourite) for flat knitting, which is no good for mitts - even if I wanted to do seams, I know to my cost that however good the seams in mittens are, they will eventually come undone - so I've had a go at charting it in the round, and hope that works...



I have a slightly unnerving feeling that it will - this has come together absurdly well so far...  But I really, really need to be doing Christmas knitting instead...

And on a completely different tack - reasons to be glad the US re-elected Obama, #45323

Sahar: proof positive of knitting life...

I have been knitting; honestly. I'm just aware I haven't blogged any for ages. Some of this has been that delay you get where you knit a present, or do a test knit, and then can't present it for ages. Some of it has just been indolence. Most of it, frankly, has just been that all my blogging time (and honestly, most of my energy) over the summer and since has been sucked into the whole KnitCamp experience, and the earlier and later fiascos. Even from the point of view of a student and observer, it's been completely knackering. I hope to catch up at some point. And some of the things I've made have been really lovely even if I say so as shouldn't.

However, just about a month ago, Franklin put up a pattern on Ravelry for download which somehow just screamed "KNIT ME!!" in a way very few things have recently, despite the huge wealth of patterns out there, particularly as I knew exactly which yarn I was going to use. So despite having 114 things in the Ravelry queue ahead of this, and a lot of yarn at home, I found myself in John Lewis buying Rowan Felted Tweed a couple of days later, and casting on in the pub (yes, I had brought appropriate needles and the waste yarn with me. I was a Brownie and a Guide. On occasions, I am Prepared).

That evening I had this

and was sort of entranced. There's a switch every 6 rows in the first pattern which stops you falling into complacency, but it's a switch like the end of a long seam in sewing, or (for those of us just old enough to remember) the ding of the bell of the typewriter at the end of a row; not too jarring, just a little reminder that something needs to be done.

There's not too much of any part of the pattern to be boring (Summer into Fall and Wibbo's as-yet-unpublished Gallimaufry compare with it for sheer enjoyment) but the DK weight yarn also makes it a comparatively fast knit. There's a provisional cast-on at each end, grafting/Kitchener stitch in the middle, and then picking up and knitting around the edge to make a border (which isn't a huge border, but still takes up about a quarter of the yarn). The picking up and knitting is dead easy if you just follow the instructions. I found a tiny error on one square of the final row of the border; which is, of course, fixed now.

A little over a fortnight after casting on I had this:

and then a few days later managed to get a photo of the actual colour of the thing.

Pictures are clickable to embiggen (despite the Firefox upgrade which means I'm having to go back to IE to link to Flickr...)

Bravo, Franklin, and thanks for the pattern. It's been a while since I was this single-minded about a piece of knitting; I think this stole will be lounging negligently around on the sofa this winter, on the rare occasions when it's not wrapped around my neck.

Catching up...

It seems like an awful long time since I posted, and lots of things have happened!

Towards the end of April I had a birthday, which stretched over three weekends, one in Cambridge, one in Chester-le-Street and one in Hove. The Actual Weekend started with a trip to the V&A Quilts exhibition (highly recommended) with Yvonne (ditto, of course!), a showing of The Ghost and a visit to GBK with Sue, and finally some knitting over an extremely nice Sunday lunch in the pub, with Cath and Avril (both knitting lace, you can tell by the expressions...)

Jackie

Lorna (with mystery test knit which I'd just dyed and blocked the day before...)

and Lucinda.

Rosie was also there - you can see her elbow in the top picture but the photo I took of her was so comically, heroically bad that it seemed safest not to include it...

Many of the knitting-related gifts, oddly enough, were purple...

We had Dissolution, and the election, and then a very strange and extremely busy post-election period.

Summer has wondered, repeatedly, whether to arrive. Yesterday morning was absolutely beautiful; last weekend was really cold and miserable; and today can't work out what it wants to do, but Test Match Special is on the radio, cricket is happening and it's pretty exciting this afternoon as England demolishes Bangladesh's batsmen (could do with less Geoffrey Boycott and more everyone else, but you can't have everything - at least Blowers, Aggers and Tuffers are all on...) I've potted up my chili seedlings today and put them in the greenhouse as hostages to fortune, so I can get rid of the heated propagator I've been falling over in the kitchen for the last couple of months.

I've had three shifts at the village library, which is where I started this post; the morning was notable for a lovely ten-year-old boy who's only had his library card for a week; when I told him he could have up to 12 items out he beamed so widely you'd swear it was Christmas morning...

Knitting has been done. The main project I worked on between then and now was a wedding blanket for Katie and Neil, assembling squares produced by members of the Archers board on Ravely, from all over the UK and from Canada - Katie blogs about it here and it's great to know she loved it. I now have absolutely no fear of picking up stitches from edges, having picked up 24 from each edge of each square! It was lovely seeing everyone's squares and good wishes, and people were wickedly inventive with the Archers-themed blocks.

I also knitted a shawl (as yet unblocked) and a cardigan (can't decide whether I like it or not now it's finished!) which I'll blog another time.

Not much progress on the spinning, but thanks very much to Isabella for her comment on my April 12 post, which has narrowly averted disaster; in future I'll either dye the fleece or the finished yarn rather than trying to dye singles before plying. I really need to sit down and read the spinning book I bought last year to get these technical details right!

Big red wolf

Well, Monday turned out to be more interesting than planned; despite my forgetting my travel pass and having to go back for it, when I got to the station, the 0804 was still there in the platform. And stayed there, for the next hour... At 0930, when I realised there was no way if we even set off at that second I'd be able to make it in for the 11am meeting, I phoned my boss and arranged to work from home for the day. And it was all extremely productive.

I'm not the best worker-from-home, to be honest; I get distracted; the PC's in the middle of the living room, and there's just way too much yarny stuff about and things I'd rather be doing. So today, to focus my mind, I decided to work for an hour and then do something else for half an hour. Mostly, that was spinning - the work stuff was absorbing enough that after an hour, taking half an hour off for the sort of mechanical activity which leaves big bits of your brain free to think creatively, was perfect, and I got loads done (and still finished an hour earlier than I'd have got home on a normal day, due to only having spent 1 hour travelling rather than nearly 4). Wish I could have a wheel in the office!


I'm spinning Jacob, still; this is likely to go on for quite a while as I have at least another couple of carrier bags of it. It's proving surprisingly good fun, despite the amount of vegetation there still is in it - I'd say that I'd be pickier with my picking another time, but these sheep were pets from the next village, rather than animals raised for yarn, and the amount of straw and moss in the fleece was pretty extreme - this is not going to be a yarn for garments. Having said that, a fleece for £5 including delivery is not something you sniff at (previous years' shearings had been burnt or used for mulch). This is the second bobbin; I wound the first one off yesterday:

I think I'll wind the spun bobbins into cakes for the moment (unless anyone who actually knows what they're doing has a better suggestion, of course! please post in the comments), and then skein, wash, dye and ply them all at once, at which point I'll work out how much there is, and what it wants to be. I ordered a WPI tool along with an impulse sock-club purchase (the club is getting to the end of its life so they were allowing you to buy one month at a time); the package won't arrive until sometime next month, but that's OK - I spin glacially slowly.

To whit - this is the rest of this year's production. Not Jacob. Merino, and Blue-Faced Leicester, and much, much prettier.

The roving for the skein in the middle was a very kind gift from Franklin when he was here in the autumn. The colourway is Rufus lupus (which translates as Red Wolf, hence the title of this post); the dyer is Sakina Needles, who doesn't seem to be in business at the moment. Oddly enough, when I was trying to track down the name of the dyer (I couldn't find the card attached to the skein but could remember the colour name), I found this Etsy listing - the spinner is SO much more competent than I am, but her skein seems more pastel. Mine reminds me of the colours of Venice and the mosaics in San Marco, so the Latin name is even nicer.

I'd spun this by Textiles in Focus in February, and took it with me, hoping for something to match it. And needed to go no further than the lovely Alison at Yarnscape (she has links to her shops at Folksy and Etsy, but I think most of her production is going into shows at the moment; and Ely Yarn Shop has some of her batts and dyed yarns) for a couple of plaits of BFL which would absolutely do the job. On the left, Rosewood, and on the right, Denim. It was definitely one of those squee moments - the pinkybrown-ness was just perfect, and the blue was exactly the right colour, too. It was also one of those weird and serendipitous things where yarn given by a friend from Chicago, and yarn dyed by a friend from Cambridgeshire, worked together so perfectly.

So, I have 450m/200g of DK-ish weight yarn; pondering what to make... I might do something geometric-y to reflect the San Marco mosaics...

Great start!

Well - I managed the daily blogging thing for 2 days... Oops.

It was a busier weekend than I'd anticipated - on Saturday I was working in the library, went knitting at the Devonshire Arms (lovely venue!) and had a friend over for dinner. On Sunday I had other friends for lunch (which ended at 5:30pm or so) and then spent the evening tidying the place up... Today, the same friends picked me up and we wandered around Ely. One of the things I picked up was a fearsome pruning saw to replace the one I borrowed last year and really need to return. When I went out to the garden to use it this afternoon, I found a wonderful thing - the dwarf tulips are flowering! (I have done nothing at all to this photo - they really are that bright!)


I totally hadn't expected the yellow centres - the picture on the bulb packet was the same as the one I linked to above; absolutely gorgeous... If you click to embiggen, there's a very happy and almost entirely pollen-encrusted ladybird in the top one...

I also have some narcissi flowering, and I hope that the others I planted in the same area, Professor Einstein, will be following suit soon... these are February Gold. The tulips were also meant to be February-March flowering, but it's been a cold winter, and I only planted them on 9th December! (And thankfully I took photos, because I can't find the packets, and had no memory of what they were!)

Inside, some knitting has been done - this is a test-knit for a friend... I'm not sure how secret this is so I'll refrain from giving the details. This was the first attempt...

in Helen's Lace, in the Get Knitted colourway. It's lovely stuff to knit - but with this pattern, it pooled horribly, so after the first 30 rows I ripped it out and have just got to that point again with a new yarn. This is Cherry Tree Hill Merino Lace in Peacock and it seems to be responding nicely...