The beauty of hand dyed yarn, is that it's hand-dyed. That means that sometimes your dyelots don't quite match. I discovered this to be the case as I was cooking along on my mmmmmalabrigo hat. Even though the skeins looked pretty similar in the shop, when I wound the second ball to go off to knitting group, I discovered that it had a little bit different flavor from the first ball. This doesn't irritate me when I discover things like this, because, after all, it's the hand-made quality that makes it so beautiful in the first place.
The second ball was a little more on the side of greens and blues, and a little less of the purples. I wanted to make a matching hat/cowl/mitts set so I decided that I needed to mix up the yarns so they would look integrated instead of like I bought two different yarns. The hat was halfway done, so I just switched yarns and knit the crown out of the second ball. The cowl wasn't even started yet, so when I started that one, I switched up the yarns about every 10 rows. The skeins had the same colors in them, so you would never notice that they are two different yarns unless I told you. Looks like a matched set, don't you think? I feel quite pleased, it was worth the tiny bit of extra work weaving in the ends. Next up, fingerless mitts to go with the hat and cowl, because sometimes you just want to be matchy-matchy.
And look who came to visit today, I think he's a red-breasted sapsucker. I find it so interesting how neat he is about the holes he drills. It was hard to capture him on camera. As soon as I tried to get closer he took off, but this little set of holes is right outside my kitchen window, so I'll keep an eye on it and see if he comes back. Even if I don't see him I may see that he's added to his tidy little arrays.
And today we've had snow! Well you can hardly call it snow - just some flurries that don't stick, but we've been rather bereft of winter weather this year, in fact I feel a bit cheated by that, so I'm counting it as SNOW today. I hope there's plenty more in store for us this year!
Well, I think that brings me to teatime! I hope wherever you are that you're enjoying a sweet Sunday afternoon too.
I love it--what pattern is this set?
Posted by: Rookieknitter2 | January 17, 2012 at 07:39 AM