Friday, March 30, 2007

Too Twisted for Words

We have reached the end of the Twisted Knitters Dye Spin Knitalong. It has been quite an adventure. I did not engage in the dyeing portion of the adventure. Instead, I used dyed roving to spin and knit a shawl. I began with a bag of fluff. Then I spun and plied and spun and plied. I ended up with my two skeins of yarn. It took me a long time to spin it all. I have read more about plying and color and how to achieve different yarn. Of course, I am a beginner. I have learned as I have gone along. This explains a bit why when I laid out my two skeins to photograph them I saw such different yarn. I admit that I was quite disheartened. I pressed on towards my goal of knitting a shawl from my handspun.

I decided to knit the Shetland Triangle. To compensate for the differences in the two skeins, I alternated rows from each ball of yarn. It worked. I knit two additional repeats of the main pattern before working the edging. I had nearly used every bit of my yarn. This is what I wanted, though I did have some stressful moments as I bound off the shawl. Then I looked at it in its unblocked state and felt a bit ill. I did not care for it one bit. My husband loved it. He especially liked the back with all of its bumpy texture. While it was nice that he could see beauty in what I had done, I was still disappointed. I told myself that no matter what I ended up with, it would be a special shawl. I put the shawl in the sudsy water and walked away. Then it was on to the clean water. I carefully lifted it out and pressed out the excess water. I spread out towels and got down on my hands and knees with the blocking wires, pins, and tape measure. Blocking really is magic.
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