Tuesday, October 23, 2007

23 October: Meanwhile, back in the wool basket..

But it hasn't all been gadding about recently. There's been some knitting and related activity going on.

At the Woolfest (seems ages ago now), one of my purchases was some Socka sock wool. It came with us on holiday, and began to be a sock patterned with a chevron stitch design. It looked awful and felt uncomfortable, so it was unravelled, and another start made with another lacy sort of stitch. By the time the foot was complete, it was again obvious that it was all wrong - the stitch pattern didn't show up, and the colour changes in the yarn didn't show up properly either.

So it became a pair of excellent plain stocking stitch socks -

All other sock knitters seem to produce fancy patterned socks, often in multi-coloured yarn, but it never seems to work out for me - *sniff*.

On the needle at the moment is a first attempt at intarsia -

This is most of the back of a jersey in Shetland wool. The black and grey are natural colours, the rest are home-dyed (some of the yarns were just recently dyed in the fibre and spun afterwards), and the yarns are not all a uniform thickness, but in small areas they seem to go OK together. To use one of my mother's pet phrases - it'll be all right when it's pressed.

The original plan was to knit a long-sleeved jersey, all in the same sort of squares. But I'm already bored with it, so it might just be a sleeveless tank-top. It's my current TV knitting - and even though the knitting is boring, it's more interesting than the TV programmes. The other evening I switched on what looked like a gardening programme, only to find it was actually an extended advert for a stately home; one that we have visited, and thought was rather dull for the huge entrance charge (all the interesting bits are "Private"), and which continues to bang on about a film made there a generation ago, which some of us have never seen, and now never want to. It made an ancient edition of "Anim*l, Veget*ble, Miner*l" look fascinating in comparison.

(Other personal views may be available.)

3 comments:

Lucy said...

Less is certainly more with the socks, the colour changes are wonderfully rich and don't need jazzy textures, to my mind.
The coat of many colours is lovely too; I always like slipovers (I prefer that name to 'tank top', which always puts me in mind of 70s acrylic in brown and orange), they are very versatile and unencumbering!

stitchwort said...

The jury's still out on the multi-colour slipover - my preference is really for quite restricted colour schemes; but Kaffe and Brandon reckon "when in doubt, use more colours", and there are all these single balls of wool...

Granny J said...

Do finish the entire jersey -- you'll be glad! Plain sleeves would be ok, I guess!