First Sweater in Two Years

Or perhaps more. My ability to knit has been so constrained.

And it took under two months to make.

l snagged a bunch of handspun hand painted yarns and started knitting mitred squares kinda willy-nilly without much of a plan. I just grabbed the next yarn when one ran out and while most of them looked pretty good together the sleeves which scraped the bottom just didn't blend that well.

The rest wasn't really fabulous either color-wise. In the back of my mind was always the thought that I might need to overdye but mostly I was thinking of a strong colour and couldn't settle on anything.

The wild collection of colours made me think of an "art" activity from when I was very young: cover a sheet of paper with all the Crayolas as thick as they'll go and then cover the whole with black as thick as it'll go. With something pointy scrape off lines or designs to reveal a rainbow under the black.

I grabbed rubber bands from the kitchen drawer and tied them around various bright spots on the sweater, crumpled it up and tossed it in a hot dyepot with a generous glug of black dye and let it exhaust without stirring.

The black reads as deep purple but it's dull enough that the circles of colour preserved by the rubber bands still pop - and it had the added benefit of relaxing the knit fabric to enhance the nature of the silk yarn.

I'm not unhappy although if I'd had more yarn I'd have made longer sleeves. But I'm back to making sweaters and that makes me really happy.