Hello, poor neglected epistolary blog!
Dear Emily,
I’m so sorry that I haven’t been able to hold up my end of this bargain and to keep you abreast of my crafty activities. There was a lull in my knitting for a bit, but things resumed soon enough, and that is absolutely no excuse at all.
I shan’t attempt to catch you up with my backlog of achievements (big word for little things, really), because it’s partly the mere thought of having to do that which lead me to avoiding my blogging duties int he first place! What can I say, I am slightly neurotic.
Instead, here are a number of things fresh off from this weekend:
1. My friend MC (who has a lovely blog there) is hard at work washing and hand-carding fleeces that she was given a while back. I have discovered that I find hand-carding a very soothing activity, and quite addictive too. Yesterday afternoon she decided to hand-dye a big batch of batts with food dye. Fun AND gorgeous!
2. I frogged my budding Pogona shawl. In the taupe coloris of Pierrot’s Teori yarn, which i find disappointing, it is a project I never even entered into Ravelry, such was my reluctance at handling it, knitting it – everything. I finally came to my senses and decided to admit it was DOA. Winding the yarn back felt good.
Then I started swatching two silk laceweight yarns together because I realized that these two tones would look interestingly faded/precious together, and reminded me of a 17 or 18th century brocade. I thought maybe I could do an interesting scarf with double-knitting colorwork, but I think that the two hues are too close; most easy patterns I was considering would end up looking muddled (you can perhaps see what I mean there, even if there are only a few rows of actual colorwork right on top of my swatch.
Here, I shall put the two pictures next to each other (click for embiggening on Flickr):