Weekly Work

A whole week since I've posted--how the days slip by! At the end of last week I came down with an awful cold. Saturday I had a meeting of my Embroiderers' Guild chapter, and since I'm on the board I had to go. My usual medicine wasn't working, and I could hardly breathe all day. On the way home, I stopped by two Goodwills and a Salvation Army. At the S.A. store I found two hand-knitted wool sweaters:

The plain one is huge, and I plan to frog it and use the wool for hats or mittens or something. The stranded one I may keep as is. It does fit me, and I can wear it as long as I wear a turtleneck underneath. It's not the softest yarn.

By the time I got home, I also had a splitting headache, so went to sleep for a few hours. That, with a change in cold medicine, made all the difference. Sunday it snowed all day, so church was cancelled and I decided to stay inside. I took some of the natural-color yarn I'd frogged from the honeycomb sweater and Kool-Aid dyed it. I wound 240 yards of the yarn into skeins and dyed it using the microwave method, in a big pyrex bowl. It took a while for the color to absorb, as there was so much yarn, but it worked great! Four packets of Kool-Aid resulted in this medium orange:

I wound two of the skeins into balls. I'll knit the larger pumpkin first, then re-dye the rest of the yarn with more orange Kool-Aid to get a darker shade for the smaller pumpkin.

I continued to plug away on the back of the FLAK sweater, and last night finished it down to the armpit, which was 9" from the center of the saddles. I've decided to pick up a longer, 40" Addi Turbo, as I'll need it when the back and front are ready to be joined. I'll use it as a big stitch-holder for the back in the meantime. Hopefully I'll have time to swing by the LYS tomorrow morning; then I'll be able to start the front tomorrow night. (BTW, I'm using size 7 needles. I was using Crystal Palace Bamboo needels, but the bamboo part came out of the join right in the middle of a cable row! I like Addi's much better than bamboo anyway, so I'm glad to continue with them.) Here is the back:

The cables don't really show up good in the photo; the shading of the Quatro yarn is really subtle.

Tonight I decided to start on the felted bag made with the multicolored yarn from the honeycomb sweater. I cast on 55 stitches on size 10-1/2 needles, knit in stocking stitch for 4-1/2", and here is the result:

I can't wait to see what it looks like when it's felted!