I am distracted by fairisle knitting at the moment, I think in part
because I have a stash full of half balls of wool, and quarter balls of
wool, and the odd two or three left over balls from a finished project,
or from a sale that was too good to resist. Or from charity shops
(because pure wool at 50p a ball is impossible to ignore.)

Fairisle, as well as being fun and challenging to knit, also seems to
be a good opportunity to make the multiple balls go further and use up
some of the half or less balls. Thus shrink my stash, which will
justify my buying more yarn at some point, for bigger projects.

This is a sample square I made from the 20g test dyeing hanks I made a couple of weeks ago. The purples are log wood (the darker purple in the middle has iron added) and yellows are turmeric (again, the darker mustard has iron) and the off white you can hardly see in the photo is elderberries, which i think was meant to go red, but i didn’t pop the skins or something. (The white is the original yarn colour.)

It is double knit, which is too chunky for this climate and me, but it was fun practice, seeing if the colours would work together (they do, but i wouldn’t wear them).

Anyways my only barrier right now is not having a pattern I like. So I might have bought a cheap second hand copy of this book, so that I can learn more about the process (this girl has yet to steek, and that seem like the scariest thing you can do in knitting), and to get some ideas of colour designs that would work.

In the meantime I have socks keeping me busy, the flower and frost shawl creeping along, a baby jumper than i really need to get on and finish, and a need for 3 1/2mm circular needles so i can actually use a stack of my sock yarn.

But today I am off to Kew House with W and his dad. It’s a pain in the arse to get to for us, but it’s also one of my favourite place in the world. 🙂