Juju Loves Polka Dots: Portrait of a Yarn

January 24, 2010

Portrait of a Yarn

I've become a yarn biographer. I spend too much of my time lovingly posing portraits, naming and recording the details of my hand-dyed yarns.

This is my first go at creating a yarn with longer repeating stripes. I had to hand-wind this merino/bamboo yarn into a 6 metre long skein before dying it, in what I hope will be repeating stripes over several rows.

I've called this colourway Skinned Knees because it reminds me of the grass stains and ripped jeans incurred while playing as a child.

And the stripes are looking pretty good. This swatch shows how they might repeat over the width of my husband's giant feet in a plain stripe or a chevron. It's a bit of mess because I was playing with different kinds of decreases and increases.

The bamboo in the yarn has the crunchiness of silk and a lovely, subtle sheen. My son is campaigning hard for this to become his pair of socks, but his Dad's birthday is first...Speaking of David's birthday, I finished my Love Bird socks for him.

I'm pleased with them, and pretty confident he will be too. I'm writing the PDF for them now and hope to post it next week. Once these are done, I promise to go back and complete the PDF's for my other projects. There has been technical computer stuff to learn.