Labyrinth Gloves and Burgundy BFL and Silk

When I went to the Waterloo County Knitter's Fair last month I picked up some yarn from Zen Garden. I know the women behind the label from Ravelry. She is a regular in one of my favorite forums Love to Dye. I was in a booth and I turned around and saw her logo. I thought "OMG! That's Roxanne's yarn! I must buy some." It is gorgeous yarn. It was two skeins tied together, one large and one small, that complemented each other. I thought it would be perfect to try some colour work with.



I decided to challenge myself to design and knit some gloves with it. Now this a challenge since A) I have never knit gloves, just mittens and gauntlets; B) I have never done colour work and C) This is my first project that I am designing that is complicated. But I like to challenge myself. Makes life interesting.

I took out all the Barbara G Walker stitch books that my library had and started to go through them. I knew I wanted to do a cable or twist stitch pattern for a bit of texture and finally found Labyrinth in Charted Knitting Designs. After some experimentation and restarting a few times to give it to fit, I came up with this pattern.

The first glove is done. Now am starting the second. Hopefully the second will go a lot faster then the first.

I've also been spinning. I finished spinning my burgundy BFL and silk hankies. They are all plied up and looking lovely. It came out to 252 yards at 13 wpi. Definitely enough for a small project.


Here is a close up.

Not sure what I want to spin next. There is an interesting spin-along theme in one of the forums that I am in but I need to dye some more fiber. Maybe I'll get around to do some dyeing this weekend.

Silk Hankies and Pictures of FO's

Here is what I have been working on lately. I dyed some silk hankies to go with two ounces of burgundy BFL that I had dyed months ago. The burgundy BFL was an early experiment of sorts. I was trying to kettle dye three colours: russet, sky blue and brown but I put too much water in the pot. Instead of staying seperate, they merged into a burgundy colour. Not bad but not what I was going for.



Sorry for the blurriness. The picture was taken months ago with my web cam before I got my camera.


So for the silk hankies I separated the 50 grams into three piles and dyed them differently with the same colours. I used the original colours to make the burgundy but kept them separate. I learnt quite a bit from this experiment on how the colours can be applied and blended. Also during spinning the hankies,I learnt how the colours interact and blend depending on how and where the colour was applied. Very good experiement over all. Right now I am in the procees of plying the too singles together: one from the burgundy BFL and one from the hankies. I will update and post pics when done.

As well I finally took some picture of a couple of finished knitted projects. The first is a shrug that I knitted last fall. The pattern is from Fitted Knits and is the Two Toned Ribbed Shrug. I only used one colour for this project and used Berroco's Ultra Alpaca yarn. Very soft and yummy. I love this shrug, I wear it quite often.

Also I finally finished the Drop-Stitch Lace Tunic from the same book. I knitted it from Cascade Pima Tencel and is also very soft. It does stretch like crazy but is very form fitted. Haven't worn it out yet since the seasons have just turned colder but I am looking forward to wear this soon.