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Sunday 24 May 2009

show your colours - all of them

this is the last entry for showing my colours - even though I am a day late.... I skipped the metal ones. deep inside I prefer the living colours in plants or the lively ones in textiles to the hard and lifeless metals anyway. but today it's a firework of all of the colours together, so here are some of my more vivid dye and fibre results of the last few years.
this is the handspun and handdyed result for my "colibri" shrug - half silk and half merino wool.
this used to be the finished shrug - but when I wore it the first time I realised that sleeves this wide are totally impractical for me. I wear the shrug quite a lot - but not in the opera or the theatre! I always work with my hands and sleeves hanging about are just no good. so eventually I took off the lace border, unravelled part of the sleeves on both sides, decreased the width and re-knitted the lace border - two complete pattern sequences less = perfect to wear now. not too wide, but not tight either! the shrug is very cozy and warm, but also light and easy to wear.
I still had a lot of the yarn left over, which is turned into moebius scarves bit by bit. I am down to the last one now, which resulted in three scarves of different lengths and patterns. nice to have in stash for unexpected gifts!
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this was another rather colourful project - due to DS's wish to have a sweater in "all the colours". I didn't dye the fibres though; I bought the top from wollknoll in germany, spun a singles yarn and knitted it - quite large at the time, but by now it fits perfectly. which of course means that I'd better get another one on the needles - by next winter it's probably too small!

this one was great fun to make. I had planned on making a Harry Potter sweater and left Stefan to decide which motives to make. of course, he loves Dumbledore and Sirius, esp. in dog form. so I started with knitting Dumbledore.... a lot of threads on the back and a lot of yarn winding later - here he is. but - I ran out of suitable yarn for the shaggy dog Sirius, which was supposed to go on the back! I had a nice black-brown-grey alpaca fibre in my stash, that would have made the perfect Sirius dog - but somehow I didn't get around to spin the yarn. so, nearly 2 years later - I suppose the sweater parts need serious (not sirius:)) enlarging on all sides to fit the much taller boy! I have to think about what to do with this - before Stefan is too "old" to wear a sweater with motives like this!! for a while he used to ask me nearly every day, how his sweater was coming along... he hasn't asked for a long time now - I suppose he lost patience with the progress (or rather the lack of it:(()
this finishes the "show your colours" series - I have to admit that closer to the end it became a bit of a struggle to do the entries for this. summer is just not a good time to sit in front of the computer too much! back to my projects - I am waiting for nicer weather to take pix of some finished stuff!

3 comments:

KayB said...

The shrug looks lovely and silk can be so lucious.... nice colours.
This was a nice project and I enjoyed it, even though the last few days were a bit hard - but what I learned from it, was really worth the effort....

Leigh said...

What a great series of blog posts. Like you, I love color! It's probably a good thing that I didn't know about this or I probably would have wanted to participate too. :)

Dorothy said...

I am very impressed by your beautiful silk/merino handspun yarn, it looks lovely in the ball and so pretty knitted up.