I’ve mentioned this before many times in both my blog and in my lectures, I buy when it is time to buy, when I come across things at a great price, and I fill up my stash so I can be creative down the road with what I have. I never have any plan for what I buy, and part of the fun is to make it actually work once I do.
Back in October of 2010, I came upon Lisa Merian of Spinner’s Hill [1], at a booth at the NY Sheep and Wool Festival. I fell in love with her crazy ball, hand painted roving, from her cross bred Corriedale, Finn and Rambouillet sheep.
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I sat on it for a couple of years, and it wasn’t until a trip to northern California and Thai Silks that I figured out I wanted to felt the crazy ball into a jacket. I bought five yards of Silk Chiffon which was half price because it was a discontinued design.
I started to felt the jacket, got the fronts and back done, and then life got in the way.
January of this year, with an intern from the local community college, I set out to finish the jacket pieces, which if you were following my blog back then, you know how painful I think felting is, and that the goal here was a jacket, not to really be a better felter.
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I achieved that goal, and I made the jacket from my standard Daryl Jacket pattern, the one I use for classes, as a sample for when I have a felter in one of my classes. I love the jacket and it is currently on display at the Blue Ridge Fiber Sho [4]w in Asheville NC. The hand couched trim is handspun from the leftover fiber that didn’t go into the jacket.
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As a matter of fact, there were a lot of leftover fibers, in colors that weren’t that appealing, the muddy khaki green, gold, raspberry, and bits of yellow and cream.
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I decided in March, to spin up what was left, into a few skeins of a bulky yarn. I didn’t care where the colors that remained showed up in the skein, and just had fun one night, while I watched the Academy Awards.
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I loved the result, and measured about 650 yards, which wasn’t a whole lot to do much with. I looked at sweater patterns, and vest patterns, and wandered through my knitting yarn stash, which is so not extensive, there is very little in the drawers, but I came upon this angora/silk yarn, I had purchased in September 2011 in a knitting shop in Central Coast California. It was in a bin marked $3. a skein, originally $25 and change. A skein. I bought one of each color they had and then sat on it. I had originally thought of intarsia, and looked at a few patterns and decided that it would be more complex than I wanted, since I do knitting when I’m traveling or with people. I do social knitting. Following complex charts defeats the purpose of knitting for me.
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The palette was exactly in line with the handspun. 🙂 ( I left out the teal.)
I chose this top down sweater pattern from C2Knits [10], though I will say it is my least favorite of her patterns (which I usually adore and most of what I knit now comes from C2Knits), but the shape would mostly work for what I wanted to do, just not in garter stitch. And I could redesign the sleeves. The great thing about top down sweaters is the ability to knit until you run out of yarn, and then you stop.
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I did a test swatch.
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I kept redesigning the horizontal stripes as I was knitting along based on how I thought the yarn would work out. I ripped regularly.
I finished up the body and sleeves and the collar of the garment, while I was in DC and Kentucky a few weeks ago, knitting the collar and lower edge of the garment simultaneously from the same ball of remaining yarn. I had about 18″ of handspun yarn left when I was finished.
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And I had a small amount of angora/silk left as well. I was pretty proud of myself, for no other reason than I “used it mostly up…”
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I got most of the ends tied in and the edging put on the front, after a couple of re-do’s, while I was at Sievers. Which was pretty great because I ended up needing a warm sweater there, and I basically lived and slept in it. Truth be told I was unhappy with the front edge, it looked OK, but the weight of the buttons caused the crocheted edge to roll inward. Made me nuts.
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One of the Sievers’ students, Ginnie I think, said to me, it probably needs a grosgrain backing to support the buttons. That’s a pretty standard finish and I’ve done it on other sweaters, but the collar is designed to be rolled back like a lapel and expose the underside of the knitting. I didn’t want to see grosgrain ribbon.
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Ginnie said, well duh, why don’t you just weave your own!
I obsessed about it the whole time I was there. The first thing I did when I got back from the city Monday night after flying into Newark that afternoon, was to set up my inkle loom with the remaining bits of angora/silk. I hand measured all the remaining bits, to see what yardage I could get, and threw up a design based on how many ends each of what I had left. I’m grinning the whole time.
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I had a bamboo in the exact color of the selvedge edge of the band, to use as weft, and I was off. I was supposed to demo all day yesterday at a local historic site, and though the loom isn’t historic, band weaving is, but the event was cancelled because of the horrific rains. So I loaded up the wood stove, lit a fire and curled up in the living room with my inkle loom and wove off the two yard band in about an hour.
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I love the way it coordinates with the sweater.
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I hand sewed it to the back of the front edges, instead of the traditional grosgrain, and now I have a new thing to do with my already trusty inkle loom, color matched grosgrain from left over knitting yarns. And of course the front lays perfectly…
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Stay tuned…