Tag Archives: handpainted yarn

Green Socks

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This past weekend was Thanksgiving in Canada. After cleaning and cooking and cleaning, I’m behind on everything after the holiday. It was a really good dinner, though, and everyone went home with some leftovers.

My completed knitting project today isn’t very exciting—it’s a new pair of socks for me. I like them, though, and given that I’m behind on everything, a new pair of socks suits me just fine. I knit these from stash yarn—Rowan Fine Art is discontinued. (That’s a Ravelry link because it’s not on the Rowan website anymore.) I liked this yarn a lot even though it was comparatively expensive when it was new. When it was discontinued, I stashed quite a lot of it. The colours are rich and it’s handpainted—they did the colour variations in a very regular manner, though, which means it makes patterns in the knitting like a variagated yarn.

Here are my new socks, knit in Lapwing:

socks knit in Rowan Fine Art by Deborah Cooke

They took 76g or about 3/4 of a skein.

This is the pattern I have memorized that varies slightly as I knit. I cast on 72 stitches on 2.5mm needles—I wrote up this pattern for my niece a while back and you can find it here. Since this yarn is thinner, I could have used 2.25mm or even 2.0mm needles.

When you look at the skein, there are four colours in the handpaint: a light almost-lime green, a medium green, a dark olive green, and a blue-green. It’s kind of interesting how they end up pairing off and making spirals of pooling. I like the efect in socks but would be less happy with this pooling in a sweater. You might remember that I made a shawl in Rowan Fine Art in a reddish-brown colourway called the Starling Wrap. You can see that there were four colours in that colourway and they paired off into repeating stripes, too. That’s something I’ll need to keep in mind as I use my stash of this yarn.

Starling Wrap designed by Marie Wallin knit in Rowan Fine Art by Deborah Cooke

And here’s an interesting project with Rowan Fine Art Aran – the same yarn in a heavier weight – by DayanaKnits, using planned pooling. This project is possible because of the regularity of the colour repeat, and I find it fascinating. Have a scroll through Dayana’s projects while you’re on her blog. She’s a prolific and talented knitter.

I’m off to a knitting fair this weekend for the first time in years. I have a little list and am hoping to find some graduated dying by local knitters. It’ll be great to have the chance to smell the yarn fumes and squish the skeins again!

Crystal Twist Shawl

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Crystal Twist is a triangular shawl with a cabled border. (That’s a Ravelry link.) It’s knit in fingering weight yarn with beads. I saw a kit for this pretty little shawl, but decided to buy the pattern on its own and shop my stash instead of buying the kit.

I had a skein of Knit Picks Bare Merino Silk fingering, which was one of several yarns including in a dye-your-own kit I bought from them ages ago. I made mine purple and there it is on the left. (The yarn on the right is KP Stroll which is a sport weight that I haven’t knit up yet)

Knit Picks yarns acid-dyed by Deborah Cooke

The incredible thing is that I didn’t have any beads to match a purple yarn. I guess I’ve used them all up. This is a bit of a wasteland for buying beads so I decided to knit the shawl without any.

I was a bit confused by the first chart, because row 1 is a wrong-side row, making row 2 and all even-numbered rows right-side rows. This was the opposite of my expectation, but once I had that sorted out, I was off. It’s a nice easy pattern to knit – you start at a point and increase until you have six cable bands, then the other stitches are in stockinette as the shawl grows wider.

I had another small issue when I started the second chart – which starts on row 1, a right-side row! – in that I was short a stitch. I did it over and over but couldn’t find the stitch. I had 52 stitches as specified but when I count the chart, I get 53, which could be the issue. In the end, I just crossed out the column for stitch 16 and carried on.

Here’s how it looks so far:

Crystal Twist shawl designed by Emily Wood and knit by Deborah Cooke

I like the colours and the pattern, but am not that fussed about the yarn. I thought it would be soft, but it feels a lot like cotton when it’s knitted up. Maybe I’ll knit a second shawl in another yarn and with beads. For the moment, I’m knitting on!

Alpine Knit Scarf

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Here’s a project from Victorian Lace Today that was never documented on the blog. It’s a wide scarf—really, it’s a stole—and I knit it in Malabrigo Lace in the colourway Whale’s Tale. The pattern is the Alpine Knit Scarf with Double Rose Leaf Center Pattern and Diamond Border by Jane Sowerby.

Alpine Lace shawl from Victorian Lace Today knit in Malabrigo Lace by Deborah Cooke

My finished shawl is about 55″ long and 18″ wide.

There are several interesting details here. One is that photography often reveals colour shifts that aren’t as noticable in real life. Malabrigo Lace, like many handpainted yarns, has colour variations between skeins. I didn’t know anything about alternating skeins when I knit this and you can see, just a little past halfway and to the right, where I changed from one skein to the next. The left skein is a little bluer and the colours in the right skein are a little less blended.

You might also agree with the idea that lace shouldn’t be knit in yarns with color variations because it hides the detail of the lace. I kind of like it.

Here’s a shot of about half of the shawl (the right half above). Even in the handpainted yarn, you can see that this pattern has a border with a central panel in a different lace pattern, and that they’re separated (and edged) with garter stitch. The Malabrigo didn’t really pool in this knit, which was a nice bonus.

Alpine Lace shawl from Victorian Lace Today knit in Malabrigo Lace by Deborah CookeThis is a beautiful pattern and I loved knitting it. Malabrigo Lace is very (very!) soft, too. I would like to knit it again in a more solid colour, just to see the difference.

You can see the pattern stitch a bit better in this older photo:

Alpine Lace Shawl knit by Deborah Cooke

My Ravelry project page says I knit this in 2007! It’s been living in the cedar chest ever since. One of the good things about digging it out for a new photograph is that I’ve kept it out and am (finally) wearing it.