I’ve knit a handful of small balls from leftover Fenris wool, and I have to say my family has never shown more interest in my knitting! “What are you making?”, “Can I have one?” I’ve just finished knitting a new version of my Vindauga Baby Blanket, which is much easier to knit than the original […]
Last week, I brought my yarn and kits to a market, and took the chance to chat with lots of people. ~ Lots of people stopped by, some drifted by on their round of the entire market, others stopped to chat. There were two things that most people told me. The first one: they really […]
Knitting stripes is so addictive. Here’s a simple technique to make the color change from one stripe to the next smoother when knitting in the round ~ I’m working on the design for a girl’s dress in multicolor stripes. It has a turned picot edge and it’s knit top-down. The first prototype is knit in […]
In the summer, when all the plants stand tall, I usually collect good bundles of tansy, yarrow, and other wild dye plants. And they have to go before the next harvest. ~ My dyestuff stores from last year contained big bundles of mugwort and tansy, a smaller amount of yarrow, a box full of dry […]
The design theme from my Vindauga Blanket just stayed in my brain after I knit the first one, demanding to be knit in more variations! And when that design theme met with my experiments in 2-dimensional gradients (or matrices), the result was the Vindauga Baby Blanket, which I’ve finally managed to publish the pattern for. […]
A while ago, I wrote about the millennia-long quest for purple, a serious business in antiquity. Since my pocket money won’t afford me any quantity of murex purple, I decided to do a series of reds from madder and cochineal and overdye them with indigo blue. I used 10 g test skeins of my Fenris […]
Purple! This color has spelled trouble for the natural dyer for centuries, millennia even… Tyrian purple, the famous purple used in antiquity, came from Phoenicia (around present-day Lebanon) where the coastal waters were full of snails of the Murex family, from which the dye (6,6′-dibromoindigo) was extracted. In ancient times, Tyrian purple was an immense […]
My blanket made out of small test skeins is progressing nicely! For each rectangle, I start with a provisional cast-on and knit in plain garter stitch until I have a rectangle that obeys the golden ratio – in my case, 32 stitches wide and 19 garter ridges tall. I used all my different test skeins […]