Startitis. I’ve got a bad case of it. As I’m spinning my largest project to date (500 grams of rolags) I’m suddenly feeling the need to knit with handspun yarn. I love knitting with handspun. The subtle or more expressive colour changes, the decreased predictability, the texture that is always changing a little bit… it makes spinning with handspun more of an adventure. You’re always curious to see and feel what comes next.
I haven’t knit much in the past years, I’ve been spinning more. So I have a sizeable handspun yarn stash by now. I opened the box that contains my precious handspun, and looked for the skein that would speak to me. Only, I found six of those. Actually, even more than six, but I held back a bit. Still. Six skeins of yarn is a bit much for a project if you don’t want to go full Stephen West.
I was immediately phantasizing about projects and I spent some time on Ravelry, looking through my queue and checking out new (to me) patterns. Each of these skeins could become so much! I decided to combine the bottom two skeins in one project (the one on the left is actually a dark purple, but my camera cannot capture it properly).
All those possibilities were a bit overwhelming. I wanted to cast on All The Projects! But hey, that’s a bit much, and in the end it would probably start feeling like work, having to finish all those projects. So I decided to be reasonable and so I got my swift and ball winder and made cakes. After all, why make a decision now when I could procrastinate?
After lots and lots of winding – all these yarns are sport weight or thinner, mostly thinner – I had six pretty cakes and I had managed to process all the ideas in my head a bit more. I had found such beautiful patterns, for example, The Emperor and the Scarab (for the purple skein on the left), Hasukai Cowl (the blue-green lace on the right), Sundry (for the bottom two skeins), Pfeilraupe (for the purple skein in the middle) and Quaker Lines for the green/pink yarn top-left.
I also admired and queued many lace shawls – even though I did not feel like knitting lace right now, it started to itch a bit. But right now I wanted to do some easy TV knitting. In the end I decided to cast on Quaker Lines. It has a simple sideways point-up construction, as it’s one of those asymmetrical elongated triangle shaped shawls. I don’t like regular triangle-shaped shawls, but I do like the shallower sideways version.
I’m using handspun yarn in a slow gradient from green to pink. I spun this yarn a couple of years ago on my Turkish spindles, in the second Just Batty challenge. This challenge was a combination of swapping and spinning, and it was a cooperation with Nunoco (by the way, they’re having a sale: 15% off, starting midnight today!). We would all select our top five batts from Nunoco and after we were paired with a swap partner, we would order our favourite batt. The package would contain a 50 gram batt of that favourite, and a 50 gram batt of the favourite of our swap partner. The challenge was to combine them in one spinning project, for example, by plying them together or creating a gradient. I really enjoyed that event!
I think that this slow gradient is perfect for a simple pattern like Quaker Lines. During the knitting I can enjoy the gradual colour change, so it doesn’t become boring. I have cast on and I think I like it.
