Progress, and a New Project Started

I have been lying in the hammock and knitting my blue tank top, and progress has been made. I decided, as you see, to knit in the round for less seaming and a (hopefully) better fit. I figure I've got nearly half done, since the bottom is considerably larger than the top.



And that's not all I've been doing; not long ago I was at a little art fair selling my glass needles and I met a woman who had just finished knitting a gorgeous shawl; not a teeny tiny lace thing you can put through a ring, but something a little more substantial, a little warmer, knit with a zillion different colors. I'm not really a shawl person, and I'm not an accomplished lace knitter...to say the least. I tried it on, I loved it, and I thought wow, now there's a great spin-to-dye project! It turned out to be the Koigu Keepsake Shawl (these pictures don't do it justice at ALL!) and I ordered the pattern, and discoverd to my total joy that it is made with 12 different colorways! A dyeing dream come true!



Spin a little, dye a little, then knit a little, nothing has to match! Wow. So I dug around in my stash of roving, spun a bunch of fairly fine merino and got busy dying! I decided to make half my skeins some sort of flower-with-pink shade, and the other half some sort of green shade, and then alternate the colors. Here are my first four skeins, the two greens bundled together, in the steamer....

And being spun to dry. I am totally in love with all these colors! And so many more colors to go!

My yarn isn't quite as fine as Koigu, sadly...I spun it considerably finer, and in fact was concerned about it, but once I had it all dyed and dried, it actually turned out to be a little heavier. Oh well, another opportunity to re-work a pattern to fit the gauge of handspun yarn.

And here's some color inspiration for all those skeins to come; this is my front garden.

I keep thinking my color selections are a little wild, but then I go out in the garden and take a look at how Mother Nature does color! In the shawl pattern, you gradually change colors from the first to the second by knitting alternate rows in alternate colors; there's some potential for wildness. But if it all occurs in my garden, bad could it be? So far, most of the colors I've finished actually appear in my swiss chard! (ok you're right, not the purple...but everything else...really!)