28 August: Technology and BFL

Over the weekend I had only limited access to the computer, as DH was playing with his new family history programme. He followed the instructions to transfer information to his iPod, and failed. I had a go, following the instructions very carefully, and failed. There had to be a way to do it, and after a lot of mucking about, he found it; but it was nothing like the directions in the manual - actually much easier!

Anyway, back to the wool. Last week I dyed some Blue Faced Leicester yarn that I had spun earlier. The aim was to get purple skeins, with a variety of shades within the purple. So I used purple and lavender dyes, plus several blues and reds, using slightly different proportions in each mixture, and using different mixtures on each skein. Some skeins were steamed, and some were done in the microwave. Here they are cooling off.

They took ages to dry, and then they were twisted into tidy hanks. They looked good laid out on the kitchen table.

They looked good out on the garden bench.


And they looked good wound into balls.

I saw an interesting jersey pattern on another blog, so I got a copy. Swatching revealed that I had one 80 cm circular needle in the size required, so a swift dash to the shops for another , and I was ready to start knitting.

It's a top-down pattern, something I've never tried before, but it's really easy to follow, and the wool is knitting up beautifully. There was a moment of panic when I thought that I might not have enough balls of wool, as the first two were going down very rapidly, so I hastily hunted out some more BFL, some of it white and some of it oatmeal coloured, and dyed 5 more skeins, which came out slightly different again. As I am using two threads together, I can switch from one ball to another and blend the different shades together.

It is very exciting seeing the colours blend together, and I spent much of yesterday working on it. It may be possible to finish it this week, which would be handy, as I can then concentrate on preparing for a workshop I am supposed to be leading at the end of next week. I've never done anything like that before, so I hope expectations will not be high. After all, I'm not an expert knitter, only an explorer knitter.