Sunday, February 13, 2011

Knitting with red

Red is an auspicious colour for Chinese new year and I started the first knitting project of the year with this 'watermelon' yarn.
It is a Bendigo Woollen Mills 2 ply pure wool. I dyed with with acid milling dye in a microwave but it seemed to have a higher than normal twist so it did not absorb the dye very well nor very evenly. It had been sitting in my stash for a couple of years now, waiting for the right project to come along..... 

The unevenness of the this colour, and the stitch pattern with its triangular repeats reminds me of a wedge of watermelon.


It is an interesting structure as the combination of plain and purl stitches, form the pleats naturally. The pattern is from the Vav magasinet (Scandinavian weaving magazine) issue 4/10. It is a simple pattern to memorise. It will probably take me a while to knit as there is 200g of yarn and I will probably knit it out as a scarf. I wonder how long that will be?
The article also mentioned a book on Gotland knitting - Pleats (Gotlandsk sticksom - Plissestickning) but it is only in Swedish. I wonder if it has lots of pictures or diagrams. If someone has this, please let me know if you can follow it without understanding Swedish!
This structure also reminds me of this miura cowl from Olga's blog and I think that they follow the same theory.

PS: Just realised that there is only 100g of yarn so it may become a cowl instead of a scarf!

5 comments:

sooz said...

Fantastic structure! The yarn looks great in it too - a good choice all round for a great new year :-)

Meg said...

I'm weaving red, too!! (Well, making the warp at this point.)

sampling said...

Thanks, Soozs, you have inspired me to do more hand-knitting.
Meg, can't wait to see your new warp.

Leslee said...

I love this shade of red. And your structure is lovely. I just recently learned how to hand knit...a whole world of fiber I've been missing out on!

neki desu said...

handsome!in awe of your knitting talent. i could weave that more or less, but knitting......