To round up our summer of beach themed colorways, I pulled this brightly colored specimen. Near as I can tell, this guy is a Striped Shore Crab, native to the tidal waters of California. I love the bold bright colors, and a bit of attitude that summer is coming to an end probably sooner than we’d like! I mixed up a deep pink/purple and moody magenta, contrasted them with bold and bright sea breeze blue and highlighter yellow, and bridged the divide with a subtle greige.
The fiber is Punta Arenas, a 23 micron wool sourced from Chile. It’s whiteness let the colors shine through. I made a blended gradient for you, but this could be really fun to pull apart and make little flecks of color to match our crabby friend on blending board or hand cards.
The yarn is trusty Journey Sock. I dyed in the round, with the greige dividing both halves, I’ll see what I can do to get a swatch up at reveal….maybe something modular would be fun…shells or entrelac? Remember with these to try a few things until you like how it is patterning.
Here’s a bit of an example, I knitted up this swatch in the round. The top part is 64 stitches, and the bottom part is 72 stitches.
I personally prefer the spiral stacking behavior of the 72 stitches, but that’s going to be a bit too wide for my feet, so I’ll work up from 64 and see how many stitches I need to get the stacking, or try some different stitch patterns that use more yarn, like some ribbing. But I definitely like the idea of a small modular pattern to keep those bright colors distinct. Kirsten Hall Designs has a number of patterns that may show off this yarn well.
There’s a few days left, if you’d like to join in the fun, sign up for Tiger Club through August 15th at https://www.thepaintedtiger.com/Category_48/Yarn-and-Fiber-Clubs.htm
