Sunday, February 05, 2006

paint & dye (but no pictures)

This weekend was a good one for home improvements, especially if you count changing white yarn into prettily colored yarn a home improvement, which I do. Tim finished painting the downstairs bathroom to a lovely blue with grey undertones, and I took down most of the hideous accoutrements (shiny gold accessories just aren't us). Now it just needs a new light fixture and towel bar and it'll be done!

I spent a few hours this morning becoming reacquainted with my dye equipment. I'm now up to an even dozen powder dyes, which means I may have to get some more squeeze bottles soon, since handpainting is a much more exact process with the squeeze bottles than it is trying to dribble dye out of spaghetti sauce jars. I seem to have managed nonetheless, and have six skeins drying above a heating vent. I'll try to have some pictures soon -- most are deep/dark colors, with a couple of rainbowy skeins, and one orange/yellow/red thrown in. I really should work up a pattern to use with these things. I don't really know what 560 yds of worsted would be best used for.

I'm plugging along on my sweater, but my gauge is 1/2 a stitch off, which I think will be okay in the body, because I'd planned a bigger size than I needed to anyway, but I think the sleeves are going to come out too tight. So, I'm planning on knitting 66 stitches instead of 60 around, but then will it get all wonky when I join the sleeves to the body and do the raglan decreases? I've tried to dissect the pattern, but haven't gotten too far.

I know that I knit half the front of the body (it's a cardigan), then knit all but 8 of one sleeve, then the back, then all but 8 of the other, then the other half of the front... so, when I join everything together, I'll have 12 more stitches than my pattern calls for... so I guess I haven't figured out how to adjust my decreases to make it make sense because I've never knitted a raglan before. Hopefully someone at knitting group tomorrow may be able to parse this out with/for me.

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