Black Friday surprises

I have a few tricks up my sleeve for tomorrow. I'll be a guest at K&F's birthday celebration, and my congo, Venus Vanguard, is also running a Black Friday sale. Not telling what's going to pop up where--or when--but here are a few sneak peeks:





Hope those of you in the U.S. had a happy and delicious Thanksgiving!

Desert Turquoise set

A couple of weeks ago, I finished a set in my Desert Turquoise colorway but forgot to post photos here. I enjoy knitting with my own yarn because I am always curious to see how a colorway turns out. This particular set was for the second knitting customer I ever had, way back in 2005 before I had even considered opening a business. Her enthusiasm for my knitting really helped me to make that leap.



The yarn is aran/light bulky Gaia organic merino, one of my favorites.

the Huckleberry colorway

For over a year now, I've been thinking about a huckleberry colorway. I thought it would have purple and green for sure, and possibly some silvery grey like the twigs of a huckleberry bush. But I never got around to dyeing it because there was something missing from the image in my head.

A couple of weeks ago, I was developing a colorway for my spring training swap partner on Ravelry. It was supposed to be deep reds and blues, with some purples where the colors overlapped. But through the magic of kettle dyeing, the experimental skein turned into something quite different and wholly charming. When the skein had dried, I took it into natural daylight and the rich purples and wine reds leaped out at me. It looked just like a bowlful of freshly washed huckleberries. And I knew I'd gotten my namesake colorway.

Morgaine

The inspiration for this colorway was serendipity. (Maybe that's what I should have named it; I've always liked that word.) I was weaving in ends for two different pairs for longies at the same time, so I had a pile of yarn snippets in all sorts of different colors. A few of them happened to clump together and I thought, hm, that's pretty. What about if I add this snippet? And this one?



I was getting ready for the Mythical stocking at Venus Vanguard and thought maybe this would work for a Venus colorway, in honor of our patron goddess. But after I dyed it, it didn't really make me think of Venus. I toyed with variations like Modern Venus and whatnot, but didn't come up with anything that caught my fancy.

Then when I was working on the listing for my Arthur caffeine cozy, I started thinking about The Mists of Avalon. It's such an original interpretation of Arthurian legend; after I read it several years ago, it felt like the true version of what really happened--all other tellings of the story seem wrong. The book is told from the point of view of Morgaine, a priestess of the Goddess. When I thought about her, I knew I'd found the right name for the colorway.

It really is nice to finally have a reliable black dye to work with. It opens up a lot of options for colorways that I've been thinking about but couldn't dye until now.

just in time for All Hallows Eve

A pair of longies in Dashing Dachs' Ghostie colorway:



This is the second DD colorway I've worked with, and the second one where I had problems with colors stacking in vertical columns. I tried adjusting my number of stitches a bit, but couldn't get it to not stack while still getting the measurements I needed. So I ended up alternating skeins in the body of the pants. I thought I'd have to alternate skeins with the legs, too, but the yarn ended up pooling in cascading diagonal stripes, which I thought was OK.

Zen Child longies, plus some gloves

I forgave the Full Belly Farm yarn for some of its imperfections after I blocked the longies. They smoothed out wonderfully and have a fantastic texture. Look Ma, no lumps!



Don't you just love the colorway? It's even better in person. I should've taken a closeup photo so you could see the subtle shifts in color, from turquoise to emerald to seaweed and aqua.

Denise of Zen-Child also sent me a rainbow colorway to work up. At first some of the colors were pooling all on one side of the pants or the other, but once I unraveled and decreased the total number of stitches for the body, the color distribution evened itself out nicely. This pair is knitted with Marr Haven yarn, a non-certified organic merino/Rambouillet blend. It pills a bit and isn't as silky soft as other merinos, but has that plush, squishy feel that Targhee has. And I was struck by how lightweight it was, given that it's a heavy worsted yarn (my gauge was about 4.25 sts/inch). The longies weighed 6.25 oz, compared to the FBF longies at 7.5 oz. Same size, similar gauges, but more than an oz difference.



I also cranked out a pair of fingerless gloves. I looked around for some grey machine washable yarn, but didn't see any that were quite the color I was looking for, so I dyed some aran BFL in a grey somewhere between medium and charcoal. My original thought was to do a pair with K4 P1 ribbing, but I got sidetracked by Soy Silk's fingerless glove pattern (link goes to a PDF file), with pseudo cables on the cuff and up the back. I knitted one glove and didn't care for it--the pseudo cables had an inverted pyramid shape that made the glove sort of baggy under the palm, and the way the pattern is written (or possibly the way my hand is shaped), the cables weren't centered on the back of my hand. Scrapped it and experimented with a baby cable cuff, then scrapped that and went back to my original concept.

WWBN and DD longies

It's been a while since my last post, eh? Lots of longies were finished, but I've been too busy knitting to update. For some reason, it's been easier to throw stuff up on my Ravelry projects page. I guess it's because I enjoy clicking the progress bar to 100%. Hey, I'll take a sense of accomplishment where I can get it.

First, the pair of longies that were going to a customer as a surprise. These are knitted with aran Blue-Faced Leicester, dyed by WWBN in the Rustic Blues colorway. When I placed a custom order for this yarn, the photo in the WWBN gallery was of bright and deep blues mixed with dark brown. By the time I received the yarn, the photo had changed. I wasn't too happy about that, but I was able to sell this as a custom slot so it all worked out. And it really is the softest BFL I've ever knitted. I had been puzzled by WWBN's description of BFL as "poor man's cashmere." This stuff more than deserves that name. The waistband was pooling in a really unattractive way; I had to alternate skeins and it still wasn't ideal, but got the job done.



And here's another custom with a WWBN colorway. This one's called Ocean Rock. Yarn is Big Blue BFL--not as silky soft as WWBN's aran BFL, but still pretty nice. I spent some time trying to fix some pooling in a leg and gave up after several attempts. Then the patterning shifted and it fixed itself, thankfully.



This pair is knitted from organic merino dyed by Dashing Dachs. I had a bit of trouble with stacked lines of colors, if that makes sense, but I added a few stitches and it was fine. Took me some experimenting to figure out the right needle size for this yarn--mfg's suggested size is 10-11, but I used 8.



Got a few more finished items to post if it ever stops raining around here--fingerless gloves and Denise's FBF longies.l

dithering

I bought some organic wool yarn in August, planning to knit up a pair of skull & crossbones longies like these for the pirate stocking:



Of course, I've run out of time. So I thought about offering it as a semi-custom slot. Anne suggested doing just a semi-custom hat, since that would take 1.5 nights instead of a week to do. Gotta decide soon. I've got three customs left to do in Sept, and three already lined up for October. So the timing would be really tight, if not impossible. Seems a shame not to do it, though. I could always offer it as a semi-custom in late October or November instead.