colour play spinning experiments

Crivens! Some actual spinning!

| eelliottknits

I’ve been sick as a pike, dearies, with a lovely head cold/flu thing that left me very tired and cranky, with the distinct impression that gnomes had come in the night and replaced my brain with soggy cotton batting. Too stupid to work, even on simple things, unless I wanted to go back and check every single detail later to make sure I hadn’t decided that 2+2=146 or done eleventy hours of knitting on needles that were .5mm too large. One thing I could do, though, was spin. I’d been working on the same spin since May 2015: ~330g of Southern Cross Fibre 60/40 Bond/silk in Vetinari, from last year’s Discworld MegaSAL. Continue reading →

Colour play 2: The Great Shetland Experiment

| eelliottknits

Being stage 2 of ongoing experiments in becoming the boss of colour in spinning.

The Cormo spinning progresses apace, but as I mentioned last time, it’s going to take a while, and I have the attention span of a hummingbird on speed. Enter some English Shetland wool from Into the Whirled: one multicoloured braid

A little out of my comfort zone, but hey, green & purple — what can go wrong?

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Hand me that sheep, Igor

| eelliottknits

If you spin, you’ve seen them: those braids of fibre, hand painted in glorious blobs of colour, with names like Night Carnival, Autumn Leaves, Mille Fiori. Those braids scare the pants off of me. Now, I love colour. I’m a knitter; I design in colourwork; of course I love colour. But for some reason, faced with those riotous braids, I’m stymied. What the hell would I do with them? What if, despite the dyer’s careful application of their art, I spin them up into something ugly? Something that offends the eye and sends children screaming to their mothers? Those colourful braids hold so much potential, and others have made gasp-worthy yarn from them, yet somehow I’m convinced that in my hands, that potential would go horribly wrong.

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