Thursday, December 20, 2007

Cooking up mittens

I'm cooking up something new -- something just for me. I handspun some Shetland wool, undyed. I tried for sport weight, but I think it came out more like a DK -- will need to practice that for my next project. Then, I put half the skeins in a charcoal dyebath, and half of them I dyed in varying shades of purple. My plan is to make a pair of Norwegian style, 2-stranded colourwork mittens. I was considering Eunny Jang's Anemoi (http://www.eunnyjang.com/knit/2006/12/anemoi_mittens.html), but the yarn might be too thick to make the pattern work. I'm also considering doing them in the Alice Starmore pattern for her Lindisfarne sweater.

My eventual goal is to have good enough spinning, dyeing, and fairisle knitting technique to make a full-size Lindisfarne for myself, out of my own handspun. And if I'm doing the dyeing, I can make the sweater in 12 different shades of red, 10 shades of blue, 4 shades of brown. It's my marathon project for this year. Right now, I'm training for the marathon with a short 5K -- mittens. Updates to follow.

Here's the purple yarn cooking:

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