meanwhile

Extending the giveaway to the Fiber College class til August 10th. Enter!

The Founder's Wife, overseeing a corporate photo shoot I was working on in some executive offices in VT last week. I like having her keep an eye on us.

Work and family life and summer and 4 wips at once = not much to show. It's not like I haven't been knitting. That'd  be so wrong, and could result in something ugly. Possibly murder, and definitely me being a mega annoying super fidgety car passenger.

This right here is the lavendar (with a nice greyish undertone) Colrain lace, that's finally found it's voice as a Miley tee. Coming along nicely except in my travels I have accidentally yanked it off the needles, more than once, coming out of a bag..

 

In my own private color forecast for fall, I'll say greyish lavendar charcoal purple is going to be Big. At Webs yarn mecca, with every shade possible, my one choice was a sweater's load of Malabrigo Rios in Pearl Ten.  (Do you wonder what Pearl Eleven and Pearl Nine look like? I do.) I have had a jones for this colorway ever since I made my sister a Destroyed Cowl . However, this bag of Pearl Ten seems more variegated and contrastier, so I'm not sure what pattern, but I want  to avoid horizontal stripes & splotches. I want a go-to cardi, I'd been thinking a new Ribby Cardi but now I'm thinking maybe a Transverse or a Grenadine? or a Kaino? Suggestions welcome.

variegated book: solid thumbs up

 

It doesn't take more than a random sampling of  things I've knit to see I have a dangerous attraction to variegated yarns. It's the "oooh pretty" factor in the skein, plus I'm a horribly indecisive shopper. A variegated skein lets you choose all those colors at once.  Even though a great deal of the time I wish the FO were solid. Because, you know,  all those colors.....

So, when I heard about this book, I thought it would be worth checking out.

Espeicially when I saw who wrote it. Lorna, from Lorna's Laces. now there's someone who should know what to do to make variegated and hand dyed yarn behave. Although I have to admit I was skeptical. You know what? Loved it. Lorna knows her stuff, and writes about all the various styles of from printed to handpainted. She explains how to guess what the yarns will do when knit up over a certain amount of stitches (really, you can sort of predict the pooling, striping, flashing, splotching? who knew?). I picked the book up to page through it and ended up reading it one end to the other.

Best part? Many examples of stitch patterns, in color, showing the effect you get with certain styles of multicolored yarns. Easy enough to substitute these in to patterns you love.

Or, say , plan for a red scarf in kettle dyed yarn. That's what I'm doing. For the Red Scarf Project .  But you probably guessed that.

disclaimer: I was given the book  The Knitters Guide to Handdyed and Variegated Yarn by Lorna Miser by PotterCraft to review. But I mean every word of it.

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And, the winner of the KnitCircus subscription is Ptarmigan. She was chosen by my random number generator, when I requested a number between 1 and 42.

 

It's good to keep a random number generator hanging around.

Ptarmigan, can you email me , ezisusATsnetDOTnet and we'll get you set up? Thanks everyone for your comments.