Knit Sisters

I bought this:

here last June and put it through my English five-pitch combs to turn it into this:

They’re pretty little balls of fluff, aren’t they?

Then I spun it up into this:

I spun it as singles to preserve the long color gradations because I had this idea that I wanted to knit this yarn into an entrelac scarf.  Sort of a la the Eleanor stole in Scarf Style.  I was hoping that the long yet random color gradations would give me little blocks of solid or almost-solid color in the way that the lovely Noro yarns do.  Also, then if the singles biased a bit, the multi-directionality of the entrelac would offset that.  Good plan, right?

The only fly in this oh-so-charming ointment is that I have never tried entrelac before.  So this yarn is still sitting at the top of the stash awaiting judgment.  I take it out now and again to show it off to people, but I haven’t even wound it into balls yet. 

One of the problems with one-of-a-kind handspun yarns is that they often end up being so beautiful (if I do say so myself) in the skein that it’s very hard to actually use them.  What if what I knit doesn’t turn out as pretty as those skeins are right now?  It’s a dilemma, and the only way I see out of it is to lose the “preciousness” of those handspun skeins.  How to do that, you may ask?  Well (I knew I would get to this point sooner or later), the best way I can see is to have lots of stash and devote more time to spinning and knitting.  Then each skein isn’t quite as precious.  Isn’t that a good rationalization for stash-building and ignoring housework and cooking?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 9:03 pm and is filed under Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.