One of my favourite Christmas presents was the 12 days of Christmas pack from Hilltop Cloud. It comprised 12 packs of prepared fibre (merino and silk) in a range of gorgeous hand dyed shades, each inspired by a Welsh folk tale. The set was beautifully packaged and it was such fun to open each pack and listen to the stories on the Hilltop Cloud website.
I was then left with the rather pleasant dilemma of what to do with the fibre as. It would have made a lovely shawl, though I’m not really a shawl person. 11 of the 12 colours are only 20g each (the other was a 100g braid which is on it’s way to becoming socks), so it had to be a colourwork project. I also had some small quantities of merino in shades of blue and turquoise that I bought ages ago – I spun all of the fibre quite fine, around 20 wpi (3-4ply thickness) then bought some neutral grey merino tops for the background colour and spun that to the same thickness.
I used Sirdar pattern 10128 – a sleeveless pullover with a round neck and wide shoulders/drop sleeves. and used all the colours of handspun yarn instead of the suggested four in the pattern.
It was fun to knit – the design kept me engaged, not just following the pattern chart but also ensuring the strands of yarn floated at the back weren’t pulled too tight.
The only problem is that K commented that Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit fame) is partial to the knitted pullover
Can’t get that out of my head now!
What’s your favourite way of using small quantities of precious yarn?
Stitches by the Sea 