pooling colors


check out my phat scarf project.

I keep having doubts about this project, but, at 5 inches into it, it would already be a shame to go back:

It kind of looks like a contour plot in an atmospheric dynamics paper.


The yarn is called Rovings; it's fingering weight, and I got a massive hank of it at the KW Knitter's Fair in September. I was disappointed when my beautiful orange-to-purple hank wound up into a big mess of colors, so instead I derived this scarf, wherein the colors stack neatly on top of each other and pool gently into one another.

I really like the look of vertically-striped scarves, so when I came across an interwave knits article on how to knit a space-dyed yarn into vertical stripes, I had to give it a go. I didn't actually have time to read the article, but the idea isn't too hard. It was tricky to get started - I kept casting on just enough stitches to get through a color cycle, but as soon as I started knitting, the colors would get screwed up. Finally it dawned on me that a cast-on stitch requires a different amount of yarn than a real stitch. So I measured how many 1x1 rib stitches it would take to get through one color cycle, and then cast on that many stitches. Then I knitted an inch of mess (I call it the turbulent boundary layer), and then cut the yarn and restarted it exactly halfway through one of the colors. Then I just knit on, changing my tension here and there when my colors fall behind or get too far ahead, and voila.

I expect to finish it in about 10 years, hehe.

ETA:
I just realized that there is a knitalong for the pooling colors scarf and it's run by Alison, the lady who does the Blue Blog . I don't even know how to join a knitalong, and I don't really get how they work, but nonetheless I feel a special bond towards Alison because I saw her at a train station south of Boston in June. She has no idea about this, of course, but I was stuck at this train station for like two hours this summer, waiting while my friend Danielle was stuck in Boston traffic, and I saw this woman with her twin boys, seeing off the boys' grandma. I was like, "Isn't that the lady from Knitty?" and probably stared at her like an idiot for a while. Only later did I stumble across her blog, and recognize the two little boys, and learn that she's from the Boston area. Crazy, eh.

Posted: Thu - October 14, 2004 at 09:50 AM        

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