Thursday FO’s and WIP’s

Here are some of my recent projects.
Pictures 3 and 4 are two-color knitting, test swatches with lots of problems, from blanks I dyed at Mary’s. These are dyed in 3 or 4 colors as wide bands blending into each other. Then I chose 2 blanks whose colors go together, raveled them into balls of yarn, and knit them as reverse stockinette on the Passap knitting machine. It makes a reversible fabric, no floats, and a nice chubby weight for winter. I have more than 25 of these dyed in many colors so I will soon decide on motifs and make some progress.
Pictures 5,6,and 7 are shibori, the ancient Japanese technique which I dyed at Mary’s on December 26. In this case I overdyed commercial fabric that was given to me which I thought was ugly. It’s a heavy silk brocade originally in tan, peach orange, light blue, etc. I washed it in hot water to get rid of any finishing chemicals, hand stitched around the stars and thru the diamonds pattern (which took about 20 hours each piece)then drew all the hand stitching very tight. Forgot to take a pic at that stage but it looked puffy and crinkled and about half the size. The finished pieces are about 70 inches by 20 inches. This piece is dyed in purple which came out as a dull dark lavendar. As expected, colors of the original pattern showed thru. The dye does not penetrate the areas where the hand-stitching has been pulled tight leaving the original color in dots of varying sizes depending how the dye penetrated. After drying and the hand-stitching removed the piece is crinkled but I washed and dried it again to get rid of the vinegar smell which was the mordant and I expected some customer would want it flatter. The pictures show the big piece, a close-up and a super-close-up. The star shapes are about 3″.
These will show up on my etsy shop which I am closer to opening, maybe this weekend, having been talking about it for 3 years.
Pictures 8, 9 and 10 are the same in turquoise. The different shades are because the original brocade had areas of fine fabric and areas of coarse fabric and they took the dye differently.