The Shawl

A heads up: this is a long post about fibre craft. If it's not your thing, feel free to skip it, or just jump ahead to a couple pictures of Béla and the cat that I snuck in.

This year my mom's turning 60, and I thought it would be nice to knit her something interesting. I was pretty taken by the knitpicks pattern for the Chinook Shawl, which I suggested to her, to see if she liked it, and if so, which colourway she'd like it to be knit in. This was back in August, before Béla was born, and while I had some time off. My plan was to ship the kit to them in Canada, and they could bring it with them when the came to visit in September. She loved it, and opted for the Riverstone colourway, all natural whites, greys, and browns. And so I ordered it, and waited impatiently for it to come.

And I waited and waited and waited. It didn't come before my parents left for Germany, but we figured that Chris and Karen could bring it when we met them in France. And so we waited some more. Finally, Jer called to check the status of the order, only to find that they had no record of it. He then re-placed the order over the telephone. (I'd initially done it over the internet, and while I order stuff like that all the time, I'm willing to admit that I might have skipped some final confirmation step without noticing. I was going a bit hormone-crazy back in August.)

Then we waited and waited and waited some more, figuring that we could get the kit when we were visiting at Christmas. Well, it never arrived. Jeremi called again to check, and it seems that this time they had a record of the order, but that it had been cancelled without any explanation included in the record of the order. He tried to order it again, but they were now sold out of some of the yarn for the colourway I wanted, and in fact didn't have enough yarn for our second choice either. They were pretty nice about it though, and sent me the pattern anyhow for free.

So what to do with a really nice pattern but no appropriate yarn? Shopping for lace yarn in Jena would only be an exercise in frustration, and I really liked the colour gradations in the sample, which I knew would be hard to mimic if I ordered yarn from somewhere else on the internet, so I decided to do what anyone in that situation would do: spin and dye my own yarn!

Okay, so that might not be everyone's first choice, but it appealed to me. After another consult with my mom in February or so, asking for what colours she'd like now that she had her druthers, she said that she'd like greys and blacks. I refuse to knit lace in black, because unless you always wear it stretched tight over bare (pale) skin or something white, all that work is hard to see. And so I decided to go for shades of grey. I ordered some dye in from a weaving supply store in Vienna (there were no suppliers for Ashford dyes in Germany, and at least in Austria I understand the website), and waited impatiently for it to arrive. So impatiently in fact, that I spun half the yarn while waiting. The original pattern involved 6 colours, let's call them A through F, held double so as to form 11 colour gradations as follows: AA, AB, BB, BC, CC, CD, DD, DE, EE, EF, FF. Rather than spinning twice as much yarn and doing it the same way, I opted to just make a 2 ply yarn and work with 6 colours in that way, starting with only A, and then one ply of A and one of B. What this meant was that I could spin all the yarn for the AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, and FF while waiting for the dyes to arrive, and then dye that spun yarn along with the rovings for the singles of the mixed colours. (I'm sorry, this is getting a bit technical.) In any case, here are my six piles of fibre, both the weighed rovings and the skeins of spun yarn, just waiting for the dyes.
And then the dyes finally arrived! It's the first time that I've really dyed anything, not counting experiments with onions skins and sunflower seed shells after a visit to a pioneer village back in grade school, and these acid exhaust dyes were really easy to use. We went and bought a cheap pot for the purpose (in retrospect it should have been bigger, even though I was never dying more than 33 g of fibre at a time), and Jer even picked up some glass stirring rods and a better glass thermometer (here I'm using a meat thermometer rigged to stay submerged with an elastic band and a vegetable peeler).
The whole dying process was made more complicated by the fact that I was using a fibre that's 50% merino and 50% raw silk, and unlike pure wool, which you can simply leave to simmer, silk starts to degrade if heated above something like 86 C, so you've got to maintain it at around that temperature for a while, which isn't easy. Another thing that I struggled with was how much to stir. You're supposed to "turn" the fibre gently a couple of times to avoid blotches, but on the first batch I "turned" it a bit too much, which was a bit too much like stirring it, which resulted in the fleece becoming hopelessly felted, and the skein of yarn felting to itself somewhat as well. (Unwilling to lose all that work, I actually pulled it all apart and knitted it all the same.)

The blotchiness was much more of a problem for the yarn that was already spun - any blotchiness in the roving disappeared once it was spun, plyed, and knit, so I really should have waited for the dyes. I'll know for next time! Besides, it's a homemade item, so the blotchiness just gives it character.

Here's a picture of some of the colours drying on a laundry rack. For some reason this picture makes them all sort of look the same colour, which I assure you was not the case. The first five shades are shown here, with the darkest not yet added to the group, and the two lightest rovings are missing, as they were being spun into the AB yarn at the time.
Then, of course, came the knitting. Somehow we don't have a single picture of me actually knitting it, so I'll include some pictures of my "helpers". Here's Béla chewing on the big 8 mm needle I used to cast off. I know, letting a baby shove pointy sticks in his mouth isn't the best idea.

There, this way is much safer.
And here's Aeris, making sure that none of those stitches get away while I left it on the couch for a while.
Finally it was finished. Here it is being blocked on the mattress in the spare room:

And finally us trying it out, offering some wearing suggestions. First, the classic show-it-off batman look:

As a classic old-lady-style shawl:

Or a more updated look (a classy silver shawl pin here would be ideal):
Or worn in front, thrown over both shoulders:

Or worn as a scarf, which would even work under a coat:

Or worn as a scarf in a way that makes Jeremi look positively Parisian:

Or like an old-timey pilot, complete with goggles (Fisher-Price blocks that Béla's trying to get back):

Or standing in as a skirt:

Or keeping your head warm on a cool day:
Or the ever-popular everything-looks-good-wrapped-around-a-baby look:



I hope my mom loves it! And while she knows I was planning on knitting it, she hasn't heard a thing about it in months, so it's sort of like a surprise. As such, this post is ready and waiting before my trip to Canada, but won't be posted until her birthday, April 21st, or slightly later. Happy Birthday Mom!