Sunday, May 14, 2006

Marble-ous


Now that Mexican Wave yarn seems to have been discontinued I've been hunting around for another acrylic yarn to use as what I might call a "poor girl's Noro" for simple modular knit projects. Had to try James C Brett's Marble yarn after hearing wonderful things about it (particularly from Alex's blog...one day I'll manage to get links into my posts...) Decided that it would be just the thing for the short row "waves" that I was teaching in my Creative Knitting class and ordered several different colours from Dianne's Knitting Yarns. As ever, Dianne's got the yarn to me in double quick time. And on Wednesday night the students got to work. Some of the colourways seemed very subtle (the orange with grey, the red, see scan on left, though the yarn isn't really *quite* as subtle as the scan suggests) and others had somewhat more dramatic colour changes (the pink with grey, the blue) but they all looked superb. One of the students found the yarn a bit splitty but we all loved the effect. And it feels much more plush than you would expect for 100% acrylic.

This week we'll be working with mitered (domino) squares, so I must get to work on a handout! I like to use garter stitch squares with decreases on the right side (a la Vivian Hoxbro) but the chain selvedge I use (knit first stitch through back, knit to last stitch, yarn forward, slip stitch as if to purl) is the one Horst Schulz uses. I'm still feeling regretful about not having managed to get the time off work to go to Horst's course in Marlow in April, as I know that he has been experimenting with combining short row effects with his patchwork knitting.

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