This week I have been dyeing yarn for a shawl commission, which will be winging it’s way to France when it is finished. It’s always quite stressful dyeing yarn for people when they can’t just pop around to see the colours. I can photograph them and e mail them, but the colours are never as true as they are in the flesh so you just have to hope it will be ok. It does help that I now have a brand new SLR camera which takes much truer photos than my old compact or my phone which I used to use a lot because it was so easy to upload photos to Twitter etc. But no more!! It’s actually quite easy to upload images from the SLR as there is an SD card port on my Laptop and it will mean I can be more organised about photo storage too.
The colours that had been requested for the commission were silvers and silvery blues. Because these are very similar I also dyed some dark grey so that I can use this as a darker contrast in the middle of the shawl border.
The dark grey, which is blurred in the background is ‘Blackbird’. On top of this is the main colour for the shawl, ‘Woodpigeon’ and the two colours in the foreground are ‘Lapwing’ – the small ball on top and ‘Stock Dove’ on the bottom.
All my yarns are dyed in skeins and then I have to wind them into balls before they can be knitted with. The smaller ball has been wound round a friend’s hands..it looks like a traditional ball of wool that you see in pictures or drawings. The ball on the bottom looks more like a cake and has been wound using a swift and a ball winder.
A swift looks like an umbrella and is used for holding the skein.
This keeps the wool at an even tension while it is being wound onto the ball winder
So now the wool is all wound I had better get on with the knitting. Design is a secret for now 🙂
MossStitch 