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I have been dreaming of scenic dyes and assigned stitches for weeks as other things have stolen my attention, but I am back to share! Today’s skein is intended to be knit up with the green in stockinette and the flowers in cluster stitches, and I am hoping for a final product that looks like a field of wild flowers, per this quick sketch:

So, just like last time, I skeined off a whack from my huge cone and set up the pans. I knew I wanted two different colors of flowers, and since the end product will be asymmetrical, I thought it might not matter if the meadow portions of the skein were directly opposite one another (we’ll find out). The dye is food coloring mixed with alum powder as a mordant, and I used boiling water to help set it. No color bleed in the rinse is always a confidence booster that things have gone according to plan!

I am SO HAPPY with this skein of yarn I took it on a little parade about the house. We’ll see when it dries, but I am just itching to knit this up into something amazing. 🏞💐🌷🌺⛰

Dawn Barker has revitalized the idea of assigned pooling, by combining a specific stitch with a given color in a skein. I was inspired by this, along with BAHyarns fancy scenic dyejobs, to produce a couple of different projects in the last couple of months, and I just dyed a fresh one today so I figured it’s well-past time to share!

To begin, I have a GIANT WHEEL of fingering weight wool from Webs that I keep around to skein up for exactly this sort of inspiration. So, I wind off a skein of whatever size feels good that day, and tie it off LOOSELY, unless I want to create gaps in the dye intentionally (like snowflakes or star or seeds or whatever). For this sort of approach, Dawn recommends a skein in which the contrasting stitch color is not more than 1/3 of the skein, so that’s what I aimed for my first time out. I was picturing rainbows on clouds when I started, so I spread my skein in the pan and poured out a rainbow onto about a third of it. Then I wrapped in plastic wrap and poured boiling water over it to set and let it soak for a long while. Zero color bled upon rinse! Woo!

Once I had the yarn, it was really just a matter of deciding what to knit in order to showcase it! I decided on a couple of asymmetrical triangle scarves. The first one is just this yarn, while the second one is striped using this and a hand-dyed blue.

Sun Dogs

and Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

It was a really joyful experience, with the garter and stockinette straightforward and simple and the pops of color done in cluster stitches to maintain interest. Inspired me in a lot of different ways!

Today’s project was significantly more inspired and significantly more advanced and I’ll be back to tell you all about it soon!

Ahoy, dear reader. Today I am going to briefly introduce a couple of projects I’ve currently got on the needles. You’ve seen glimpses of them on the insta and maybe that intro post, but this is for a little project bio. I’ve just realized it, but two of them are related to the MDK community in one way or another. Fun!

First up, a sweater. This one began when MDK started talking about this year’s Bang Out A Sweater event, held every February. Sometimes, I scroll Ravelry for inspiration and the scrolling takes a little while. Other times, WHAMMO! There’s a something I MUST HAVE on the very front page. This sweater inspo was the former, and the stitch is basically the Sea Glass Sweater from Wool & Pine. It’s just a 1×1 Fair Isle with a good color scheme, though, and I am not a big fan of knitting from the top down, whether it’s sweaters or socks*. So, I took that 1×1 obsession into my plötulopi stash and came up with a plan for a bottom up rainbow striped sweater…with a raglan decreased yoke, since double decreases makes invisible sense in the 1×1 colorwork.

I have just finished a single rainbow repeat after joining the short sleeves to the body, equivalent to a couple of inches, and am ready to begin the decreases…so: one last bit of counting and I am off to the races. I will introduce a few short rows throughout the back of the yoke, to the tune of one extra row of a single rainbow stripe per rainbow repeat. So, the first repeat will have a third row of dark red/red, the second repeat will get an extra red/orange stripe, third is an additional orange/yellow, etc. Should get me a subtle height increase without a hump, and I am hoping to announce a complete sweater the next time I visit the blog. 🙂

Next, a scarf/shawl. This one was a request from my mother-in-law, who asked for “something for my neck,” and when I asked for colors she merely said “blue.”

I like to knit intricate things for people who will take care of them, so I immediately set out to the stash on a fancy laceweight expedition…and found inspiration in the drawer! Last summer, I was experimenting with gradient dyeing balls of yarn – basically, you wind a NOT-center-pull ball of yarn and plunk it into the dyebath. Soaking the yarn/ball first will allow the dye to penetrate deeper into the ball, but otherwise it’s pretty experimental as far as how tightly to wind the yarn and how big a ball is worth dropping in the bath (too tight and too big means you’ll have a mostly undyed project with just a bit of color at the very edge…too loose and too small and the entire ball will just be one color).

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After a few successful goes with this technique, I wondered what would happen if I used a center-pull ball instead. I had a few skeins of Puppy brand 3-ply wool in white my brother and sister-in-law brought me from Tokyo, so I set about dyeing a gradient of gradients in gold. One ball at a time, twenty minutes in the dye, until the bath was exhausted. So, the first ball through is much deeper shades of yellow than the final ball. As I hung the skeins to dry, I loved them so much I made a small pot of blue and tossed in my last ball of white wool.

This experiment resulted in a double gradient for each ball – the strand runs from dark to light in the middle to dark again at the other end. The yellows are patiently waiting for the perfect stitch pattern to come along (they sit paired with a pink merino/silk handspun in a bag I mentally refer to as “strawberry lemonade”)…but that single skein of blue was perfect for this. The only drawback to the Puppy yarn is the short put-up: 240m/40g. Since I had such a limited amount of this one of a kind yarn, I was back to the stash for something to complement it, both in weight and color. Enter Manos del Uruguay Marina in “Petrol.”

The final step in the prep phase is to choose a pattern (or to choose to wing it…), and I was looking for something to match my knitting mood – fancy, but not complicated, and to show off the gradient dyejob to best effect. Enter Waiting for Rain by Sylvia McFadden. I have knit this pattern before, and I love the alternating superchill garter stitch and simple lace panel inserts. The final project is very customizable, because the pattern is more of a recipe, so it’s easy to create a unique-in-all-the-universe object.

I finished it last week, and was going to place it in the post, but the MIL announced she is coming to visit for the husband’s 50th in April, so I will just pack it up and gift it in person. <3

Finally, a rug. I got into knitting/felting wool rugs last year when MDK banged out a Kiki Mariko. I did not bang out a Kiki Mariko, but I DID bang out a rug using the KM techniques (worsted rug wool held double, knit in the round, felting, steeking) using stitch patterns from Strange Brew (Tin Can Knits). I learned a lot from that first rug, from how much vigor it takes to felt a large object in a top-loading washing machine, to what kind of final gauge I can expect when something is felted to maximum density. Still on a bit of a kick, I did then knit a KM for Mothers’ Day. 😀

This project is rug wool held double on US 11s using motifs from Jane Mucklestone’s Fair Isle Motifs that have been mildly customized to my taste at this gauge (I hate the super long floats), and is the first project I am tracking my time for. I charted motifs for a tapestry of our municipal Rose Gardens at Idlewild, with the Truckee River along the edge (water), followed by the open green spaces of the park (earth), the blooming roses (flame), and finally the changeable skies of our favorite valley (air).

I only have the sky to add, so this is another one I’m hoping to complete for the next update. 🙂

There are, perhaps, literal dozens of other projects on the needles, but that’s enough for one post, haha. Tune in next time for some showing off of Finished Objects, and another round of introductions.

* I hate to knit socks from the top down because I really like to get the most out of my skeins – when I knit two-at-a-time from the toe up, I can keep knitting until the cuffs are a game of yarn chicken, instead of guessing at the leg height I’ll get out of a skein and then ending up with 20g of leftover sock yarn.

I hate to knit sweaters from the top down because I end up abandoning projects on Sleeve Island, and they are sometimes then lost to the mists of time…I am terrible for yarn discipline, haha!