Time for another reveal! August was about the waning days of summer, and enjoying those last pretty evenings before we have to worry about bedtimes and homework. “Sunset over Sage” is a glorious purple-coral-straw sunset over a field of sagey green.
The hand painted Bengal sock yarn was designed for something called Planned Pooling, certainly not a new concept, but developed into an ‘on purpose’ technique by Gladys We and Karla Stuebing (a.k.a. wenat and statnerd on Ravelry). Here is their handout from a workshop they gave at Sock Summit. Hold that thought…..I’ll get back to intentional pooling in a minute.
Since I designed the sock yarn to do lace, I thought a fiber meant for lace would be a good compliment. So the fiber is Wensleydale. It has a lovely long staple, and begs to be spun thin. The color repeats are short, considering the staple length, so I will be interested to see what people do with it. Anyhow, hands far apart, and keep the twist low.
All right, back to the pool! My original thought was to try to knit the scarf on my knitting machine. It would be cool….I would be able to see the whole row knit at once and be able to control the tension more easily. And I could count the stitches in each color and design a lace pattern to match. And then I wouldn’t have to mess with directions or charts….just let the machine keep track of that.
So I diligently set out a few repeats.
Safety pins and knitting machines don’t mix, so I use a single ply of a waste yarn to pierce and tie where the turns would be.
And then I put it on the machine.
Too many stitches on this side…..
And not enough here…..
Ah….just right!
Once I got the first couple of rows lined up, it seemed to be going well.
Except you can see that top row shifting……and I tried to get it back, tried to cycle it around, tried different tensions and stitch numbers….and well…..I got this:
There’s moments in there….but not at all what I was imagining.
So ribbit ribbit ribbit……and some circular needles, and here is where I am. I have no idea what size these are, and I haven’t counted the stitches. I’m using seed stitch (because anything more complicated is going to fall out of my head right now), and it seems to be working out ok. I watch each color and adjust the yarn so the colors stack pretty well.
One inch down…..about 70 or so to go!!!
