Stripes

For January’s Tiger Club, we took a bit of a journey to a warmer clime.  Imagine grasses and palm trees overlooking the ocean, and you have the idea.

To capture the pale blues and greens, I went with Falkland for our fiber.  It’s a location, rather than a specific breed, and the wool pool on the Falkland Islands is chosen for whiteness and fineness.

Panda is our yarn, a blend of superwash merino, rayonized bamboo, and nylon.  I don’t care for it so much in socks, so I decided to dye it for a shawl, as the yarn drapes beautifully.  The picture below shows the color order….lime to deeper green alternating with pale blue skies deepening to clear blue ocean.  Each color segment is roughly the same length, but honestly, this was eyeballed.

The method used (for the sock yarn AND the fiber) is ‘blended gradient’, which means I let neighboring colors touch, mingle, and make new transition colors.  So when knitted, this will be semi-solid at times, and variegated at others.

I’m looking forward to playing with a few skeins of this myself, I’m thinking of weaving a long vest kind of thing, maybe with a sand color as weft.

Tiger Club is currently full, but you are welcome to drop me a line if you’d like to be on the waiting list.

Look at this handsome fellow!  A lovely blend of greens, blues, browns, and a bit of black and white.  I’ve made variations of some of the colors over the years, but I wanted to capture more of them at once.

Our fiber is a new variation (to TPT, anyway) of an age old fiber….Merino.  This is 19 micron, and is cottony soft.  I dyed ‘there and back’ with the colors, so you can split it the short way in the middle if you want a matching 2 ply.  (Yes, I totally posed it in a duck shape.)

For the yarn, I wanted to capture some pattern, too….like the white dots on the orange-brown breast.  I thought it would be too busy in variegated, so I went with stripes, on Journey Sock yarn for a bit of shine.  The two blues are different in person, goofy camera.  Anyway, I like how it turned out, and it will be a fun knit that can take a bit of pattern, or not, depending on what you’d like to do.

Subscriptions are open for November!

I love to look around me for color inspiration, and September’s Tiger Club was no exception. Despite being quite a warm fall, even in mid-September a few trees were responding to the shorter days by withdrawing their chlorophyll.

To achieve the tones and randomness, I applied a shade of green and a good strong red to both yarn and fiber, then overdyed them with shades of yellow and gold.

The fiber is Shetland, which is a fantastic all around fiber, and I particularly like this batch of it.

The yarn is a sport version of an old favorite. Tiger Twist 365 is a nice superwash merino with a good hosiery twist on it. Of interest to me was how yarn dyed in the same batch, with exactly the same treatment, would behave differently in the overdye. Some kept the green and red as stark speckles, and others released them and made a more blended effect….and some did a little of both. Pretty cool….no two are alike.

I do have one sock and one fiber spot left in Tiger Club for October, you are welcome to join us!

Time has just been flying by!  Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for September’s Tiger Club.  Here is a look back at the yarn and fiber club members received in August.

I follow a few fiber groups on Facebook, and this picture was posted for color inspiration.  It’s a species of Saturniidae moth, and wow, isn’t it fun and colorful?

The appeal of this picture to me is the jumble of colors. So I decided to hand paint a ‘stick figure’ caterpillar on the yarn and fiber. I used three purples, a shocking blue, bright magenta, and some gold….and allowed the natural white to show.

The yarn is a riff on a favorite sock yarn here….Journey. Except instead of Merino, it is BFL (blue faced leicester) wool. Same 4 plies, same great yardage. I can’t wait to see how it dapples and pools.

I painted in a similar technique on the wool, but there are more folds so the dappling is more spread out. The wool is Polwarth, a hearty cross breed of Merino and Lincoln. The wool is a little longer and stronger, but retains that nice pouf and fine crimp of Merino.

I invite you to check out the club and try it for a month. I love dyeing for my club members, and it is fun to get a new surprise. For September, I’ll be shifting into fall mode with fibers and colors.