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Knitting and Spinning Gallery

This is a pair of mittens I knit out of the same yarn as the sweater at the bottom of the previous page.

I made the yarn after my spinning guild had a roving exchange. I had about 30 one ounce balls of roving in various colors. Most were wool, but some were other fibers or blends of wool and other fibers (wool/mohair, wool/angora, etc.) Rather than spinning 30 different one-ounce skeins of yarn, I wanted to just spin one yarn. It was sheer laziness on my part, really. I figured it would make designing a sweater a lot easier!

I spread the roving out and divided it into lights and darks, brights and dulls. Some colors were kind of ambiguous and could have gone either way, but I needed the same amount in each pile, so that was the deciding factor. One pile became one ply; the other pile the other ply.

To spin I tore off a small handful of one color (usually about a 6" length of roving, but it depended on the thickness. Since they were all from different people, they varied) and spun till I was almost out of roving, leaving enough for a nice join. Then I'd pick a handful of another color, choosing one that looked good next to the one I had just finished. I had to be sure to use all of the colors and not just the same few over and over. I didn't want to run out of some colors halfway through and not have used other colors at all. On the other hand, I didn't want a regular repeat of colors. I wanted it to be random. I ended up picking out about 8 colors at a time, arranging them in a pleasing order, but making sure it wasn't the same order or the same colors I had just used.

I was really pleased with the result. I had beautiful, colorful yarn. The sweater I knit goes with everything. Since I had yarn left over I knit the mittens, and also a pair of socks (not shown).

Wearing this green tweed sweater is like wearing a hug. It's incredibly warm and soft. It's a wool, angora and silk blend, and for some reason, I ended up spinning the yarn thicker than I usually do. I'm glad I did. My metabolism changed with my weight loss, and I'm colder than I used to be.

The light green tweed nubby bits are silk noils. The rest is a wool/angora blend. I dyed the wool and angora several shades of green, along with some blues thrown in, and I had it carded into roving. It came out more blended together than I had expected, almost a solid green except for the lighter green silk noils I had them card in. I had to think about what to do with it for a while. It wasn't that the roving I got back was ugly...it was just boring.

Finally I decided to rainbow dye it. I left it mostly green, but overdyed it a little bit black and a little bit a warm brown color. As the powdered dye slowly sank down through the dyepot, some parts of the roving took up more color, some less. The colors mixed a little bit at the bottom of the pot. And large areas received no dye at all. This was all intentional. Still, I waited with eager anticipation while the roving cooked to set the dye, wondering what the results would look like.

I was pleased. Taking something I've dyed out of the dyepot always seems like opening a present, especially when rainbow dyeing, so I'm looking at more than one color. Because of the way the lighting in the photo hits them, you can't tell that the buttons are abalone and have the same greens and the warm brown color as in the sweater. I'd been saving them for 12 years for the right project to come along!

This is a wool/angora blend. The roving was first blue, and then I rainbow dyed it partially green and purple, leaving most of it blue, using the same process as with the green sweater above.

Inspired by Ghanaian Kente cloth, I knit it in vertical panels using intarsia so that the different colored sections of yarn would make blocks of color by being concentrated. Rather than a stripe going all the way around the body of the sweater for a row or two, the same length of yarn would only go back and forth for the width of one panel, but for many more rows. The blocks of color in the different panels did not match up. It was more random than Kente cloth, of course, but I wanted it to be.

The sleeves were a little tricky. Normally, I always pick up my stitches at the shoulder and knit in the round toward the cuff. I do this partly because I don't want to do any sewing (I want to be finished when I'm finished!), but mostly because it's the only way I have any chance of getting the sleeves to be the right length! But I still wanted the sleeves to be in the intarsia panels. I didn't want to switch from blocks of color to narrow stripes. I didn't think it would look right. So I compromised. I picked up the stitches, but knit back and forth. There are two panels and then the stitches on either side of the two panel section in the middle. I knit the sleeve back and forth till it was nearly long enough, tried it on to figure out how long it really needed to be, knit the rest, tried it on again, sewed the seam, knit the ribbing and bound off.

This one is 100% wool (Romney-Finn), and this is the color it is right off the sheep. No dyeing. Well, technically it's not the color it was right off the sheep. All the dirt that washes out... (Actually the dirt that washes out is a beautiful color, a rich, dark copper shade.)

I was in the mood to do cables, so I did a whole lot of cables! There are only two cable patterns though, and one of them is very simple, so I didn't have to think very much at all when I was knitting this. I'm not sure where I got the larger cable pattern from -- I think from a back issue of Knitter's Magazine, but I'm not sure which one.

I love this natural gray color. I keep thinking some day I'll do a simple gray sweater, something plain. I don't seem to be capable of doing that though. I can only knit plain sweaters out of complicated yarn or yarn with a zillion colors.

I didn't design this vest. I bought the pattern from Lucy Neatby. I made the yarn after my spinning guild had another roving exchange (I got several balls of white roving too, but they wouldn't have worked in this project. I'll use them in something else). Again, I wanted to spin just one yarn, but I did this one differently. I actually spun the yarn with this vest pattern in mind. Like before, I spun one color after another on the same bobbin, but this time I Navajo-plied the yarn so it would be solid sections of color instead of barber-poled. Of course, some sections were variegated because the roving itself was multicolored, but that's something else. I also spun larger handfuls of each color before changing to the next because the length of the color would only be a third as long after Navajo-plying. I wanted each section to be approximately enough for one triangle of the vest, though of course it would be pointless to even try to get it to come out exactly right.

The vest was a lot of fun to knit, and it went really fast because I hated to put it down. Lucy's directions were really clear.

This is a bunny I knit for a coworker for a baby shower gift. It's kind of hard to see clearly since it's made out of black matte cotton, but if you look really closely you can see the ears. I got the pattern at http://www.heartstringsfiberarts.com/bunny.shtm. I did a couple of things differently from what the pattern instructed. First, I made a 12" square instead of 6" and made the ears proportionately bigger (I wanted to make something big enough to hug, not just look at). She has you decrease the ears just along one side, and I didn't think that looked right. It might have looked ok for smaller ears, but for larger ears it just looked wrong, so I did decreases along both sides, just alternating so it would still decrease overall at the same rate.

She has you sew the back feet to the stomach to get the back legs to stay curved underneath, which just seemed cruel to me! I left the feet loose so the rabbit looks like it's in mid-leap, and it's more huggable that way.

I also did the tail differently. She tells you to just use some of the stuffing, but I stuffed it with fiberfill, which I could only find in white, and since I knitted it with black yarn, that would've looked all wrong, I thought. So I attached many many pieces of the yarn as closely together as I could, and then cut them short, so that's the tail. I'm pleased with the way it turned out. It's very minimalist as rabbits go, but it's a cute little thing.

And yes, I did make the quilt in the background!

A lot of the sweaters I've knit no longer fit me since I've lost so much weight from bike commuting and other lifestyle changes I made a few years before I started doing that (I became a vegetarian for ethical reasons. To save money, I rarely eat in restaurants now. I quit drinking pop because I simply decided it had no nutritional value and it was disgusting). I weigh about 85 lbs. less now than I did at my heaviest, so depending on when I knit them, some were looser than others. My plan had been to alter some and reknit others. Eventually, though, reality hit.

Wow, they were really way too big. I had knit them to be loose in the first place. And now... Even some of the sweaters I had knit fairly recently were way too big. I think I just had a distorted image of what size my body was when I made them, like I couldn't believe my body could be this small yet, plus I had lost more weight since I made them. When I put them on and really looked at them, I realized there was no way they could be altered to actually make them fit. The neck openings were too big. The sleeves were too bulky and started too low on my arm. The sweaters were just way too big.

And wow, that was a lot of sweaters! Did I really want to be altering sweaters for the rest of my life? Well... I kind of wanted to knit some new sweaters. I looked at all those sweaters, and I felt like a glutton. I had all those sweaters and I wanted more?!

Since I was getting divorced and moving, I was looking at a lot of my stuff with a new eye. Geez, I just had too much stuff. I did not need all that stuff. It was nice stuff, but there was just too much of it, and I just didn't need it. I did need money. I just needed to find people who wanted my stuff. So I sold a lot of my sweaters that didn't fit anymore, one at one of my moving sales, and the rest on eBay. I didn't get as much as I felt they were really worth. I mean, it's not a way to sell sweaters as a livelihood. But I got enough that I knew the women who bought them really loved them and thought they were beautiful. I knew they were going to good homes. That was important to me. I was apprehensive about parting with them. But the women who bought them told me how happy they were to get such beautiful things, and I felt good that I had made people happy, and I knew my sweaters would be loved.

Years before my spinning guild started having roving exchanges, we had a yarn exchange. Someone who had done one in another guild suggested one, and it sounded like fun. She had done a cuff to cuff Fair Isle sweater and enthusiastically recommended them to everyone. Quite a few of us did these (some people did other kinds of sweaters, or other kinds of projects entirely). It was fun to see them, because while we had all used the same yarn and the same idea, they were all completely different! They were all beautiful.

This was great fun to knit. I just made up the patterns as I went along, using whatever colors it seemed I hadn't used in a while, whatever it seemed to "need" at the time. The whole thing was just so spontaneous. I felt so free.

My contribution to the yarn exchange was the yellowy green yarn, dyed with turmeric and copper sulfate. You may or may not get this color if you dye wool with turmeric and copper sulfate. Lots of factors affect the color you get with natural dyeing, including the pH of the water, minerals in the water, the mineral content and pH of the soil that the dye plant grew in, the breed and condition of the wool, etc. But in general, turmeric gives yellows, and copper sulfate is the mordant that makes things green.

I knit this as a pullover but figured I'd probably turn it into a cardigan if I altered it. It would be more useful to me that way. With sweaters I tend to put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off... But it needed a lot more altering than that, and I had been meaning to alter it for about 4 years... Obviously I just wasn't going to. So I sold it.

This Fair Isle cardigan was one of my favorites. The Fair Isle pattern is from Alice Starmore's The Celtic Collection, but in the book it was a vest with six colors. I used 26 colors in my cardigan.

I can't remember exactly how I got 26 colors. I do remember a friend gave me some wool yarn she didn't want anymore that was a soft coral pink color. It was pretty, but it wasn't anything I'd ever wear. It was too...girly! Time to overdye! I know I used natural dyes, and I know I did two of each skein, and then in the end overdyed one of each in a cochineal bath. But I don't remember what any of the other dyes were. I didn't keep very good notes for this project. I'm guessing marigolds was one.

I really loved this sweater. It was a hard choice to sell it. But it was so big on me, that altering it just didn't look possible. I mean, it went around me 1½ times. I thought about just hanging it on a wall as art, but I didn't want it to gather dust. And it seemed like it should be worn. So I had to find it a home.

More natural dyes. I took notes on this project, though perhaps not great notes. The dark brown was dyed with black cherry bark with no mordant. There is another yarn that's black cherry bark and iron. The orange was madder and alum. There are two slightly different yellows -- they're both turmeric, but one was mordanted with alum and the other with copper. I'm not sure about the pink. I wrote "orange-rose" but I'm not sure what that means. There are two light tans, both dyed with tea. One was mordanted with alum, one with copper. There are two reddish browns. One is henna and copper; the other is sassafras and copper.

This is a pullover vest with Bohus patterns, though not in traditional Bohus yarns. Bohus Stickning was a Swedish cottage industry that began in the 1930's and continued until the late 60's. I first read about Bohus in Margaret Bruzelius' article in Threads, "Exploring a Knitted Pattern" (1986;(6):35-39), and that's where the patterns in this vest are from. I thought I might be able to wear this vest, because I remembered that I had worn it for a while, then later it was too small because I had gained weight after I knit it, so I figured, well, I've lost weight... But it was way too big too. So I sold it along with the others.

I was thrilled to see an entire book published about Bohus Stickning in 1995: Poems of Color: Knitting in the Bohus Tradition by Wendy Keele (Interweave Press). The book contains the fascinating history of the company, from its beginning as a cottage industry started by Emma Jacobsson, the wife of the governor of Bohuslän province, as a way to help women earn money for their families during the depression. Emma had studied fine arts before earning a PhD in botany. Her artistic talents (she designed most of the sweaters herself in the early days) along with her good business sense made the company such a success that eventually it grew into an internationally known company. While still employing Swedish women to handknit the garments, it was no longer relief work. It was simply work.

The book has many photographs of the original sweaters as well as photos of newly knit versions, in the original colorways, but a bit looser than the originals, to reflect current tastes. Color charts are given for all the designs (the same design would usually be used for a yoke pullover, a yoke cardigan, a cardigan with a straight repeating pattern, mittens, etc.), and patterns are included. I used the chart for "The Blue Shimmer" to knit this pullover, though I used completely different colors (nope, no blue here). But in keeping with the Bohus tradition, these are soft, fuzzy yarns.

I'd been wanting to do a sweater for some time with various undyed natural fibers from different animals. This seemed like the right project. The black yarn is dog hair (Newfoundland). I didn't card it first. I started to, but it was such a pain that I decided to try to just spin it without carding it. It was fairly easy to spin, though occasionally it would get away from me. The warm gray is wool. There's also a dark brown wool, though it might be hard to tell from the black in the photo if you don't know it's brown. The warm reddish brown is llama. The light gray is angora, from my rabbit, Frida. The honey-cream color is tussah silk (unlike cultivated silk, which is white, tussah silk is from wild silkworms. They eat leaves rich in tannin, which colors the silk they produce. They also chew their way through their cocoons and go on with the rest of their lives, rather than being killed, as is the case with cultivated silk. Pretty color, guilt-free...I like tussah silk). There's a little bit of light gray that isn't the angora (it's a little bit darker than the angora, but lighter than the wool), and there's hardly any, so you probably can't even pick it out. It's cat hair. For years my grandma kept giving me hair from her cat and telling me "you can spin it." I assured her that some day I'd get around to it. When she was in the hospital with cancer, I realized that it was some day. I spun a small skein to take with me when I visited her. I think it meant a lot to her. The white yarn is mohair (mohair comes from an angora goat).

I only ended up wearing this sweater a few times, unfortunately. I didn't anticipate how warm it would be! It's much warmer than any of my other sweaters! Hoo boy, it's really, really warm! I also didn't anticipate how much the dog hair would shed. Oops. Since I did end up being a lot colder after I lost more weight, I considered altering it and trying to vacuum out all the excess dog hair so it wouldn't shed anymore (a really warm sweater might be good now), but I decided if I didn't want to spend my entire life altering sweaters, then this probably wouldn't make the top whatever-number to-do list. I loved it, but if I was honest with myself, this sweater was just too dressy for me.

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