Darkside Cowl

I have recently finished knitting a project with my own handspun Raspberry Silk! I don't think I really knew how satisfying it is to knit with your own handspun. I envisioned it, but I did not full understand it. When I look at the cowl I see all the parts of me that went into it. From selecting the fibers I wanted to dye to the experimentation in the dyeing process to the actual spinning and plying, then finding a pattern suitable for my yarn. It was a great journey. I must state that I did not foresee this cowl when I first started the yarn. The whole process was an experiment but it came out wonderfully.


And there it is! That's me modeling it. The cowl is intended for a co-worker of mine for Christmas. Pink is her colour so I hope she will like it. Here is a close up of the stitches.


I have also been spinning for my Newfoundland Iceberg yarn. I seem to naturally want to spin thin. Not sure if it's me or the fiber or the spinning wheel that wants to spin thin when I spin BFL but the BFL singles came out thinner then I envisioned. Oh well. It will be pretty anyway. Here are the BFL singles.



Next I will spinning the silk hankies to ply with the BFL singles. I love spinning silk hankies so this will be lots of fun.

Newfoundland Iceberg Dyeing

As some of you might remember I frequent the Ravelry forum boards a lot. Seems to me that I spend way too much time on there but I love this community. There is so much inspiration and knowledge shared on these boards. It is fabulous.

One of the many groups that I am part of is the Canadian Spinners. Great group with great people. We have started a small challenge to spin yarn based on different areas of Canada. For the month of October the challenge was this gorgeous picture of icebergs in Newfoundland. Now since it is now November first I'm a bit late but I thought I'd do it anyway. I finally got around to dyeing my fiber on Thursday and now everything is dry. I'll start spinning it this weekend and hopefully what I envision will become a reality. Cross your fingers folks.

So I experimented with kettle dyeing again. The last time I kettle dyed it was when I ended up with the burgundy Blue Face Leicester. All the colours merged and the colour came out great but not what I was aiming for. This time I paid more attention and since the iceberg had quite a bit of white in it I played with negative space instead of saturating the whole BFL roving. This is what I came up with:

I am very pleased with the outcome. The colour is close to what I was aiming for. I basically had three colours that I mixed up. Two were the same blue but at different intensities: one very light and the other very deep. The third was a medium blue-green tinged colour. It is subltle but effective.

I also dyed some silk hankies to ply with. I'm really liking plying a wool single with a silk single. Really makes the yarn shin. Since the iceberg was in the water I figured that the reflective and shiny silk would be appropriate. I decided to kettle dye the silk hankies as well. In the past I have only hand painted them so this was going to be new.


I dyed the whole 50 gram stack in one shot. The pictures above are that stack split in two and each side shown. There is a great variation here. The dye did not penatrate all the way through. I did flip the hankies so both sides would get dye but it is not even. Since I did not want an even dye job this is great. The texture is awesome. I will definately try this again.

On a side note I finally finished my labyrinth gloves for my mom. I mailed them on Thursday and hopefully she will get them on Monday. They said two business days so lets cross our fingers. The second glove went much faster then the first. I really enjoyed knitting these gloves, going to have to knit myself a pair but with a different pattern so that they are unique. I'm flirting with the idea of writting up a pattern for others. Let me know if anyone is interested.

I didn't take a picture of the two gloves but here is a picture of the first one in case you all forgot what I'm talking about. ;o)