This past fall, I lost my jacket. I don’t know how or where but it was my favorite jacket with a waterproof outer shell and a zip-in fleece. I wore it almost all year long and when I lost it I wanted one just like it. Unfortunately, Columbia had stopped making that particular model and so I started looking on Ebay for a used one. A woman in Seattle was actually selling one at the time so I snapped it up.
This whole situation put me in a bit of a dilemma. I was at the time spinning and knitting some lovely silk/wool fiber dyed in a dark plum/green/blue colorway for a hooded scarf to match my slate gray/black jacket. Now, half way through the process, I wound up with a sky blue pastel jacket. I went ahead and finished the scarf but realized that it did not match my jacket at all and that I wasn’t going to use it. So, I did the only reasonable thing and gave it to a friend.
Now that winter is over, I finally got around to dyeing and spinning up yarn to match my new jacket. I was envisioning a scarf that flowed between sky blue, aqua and light purple in long color changes. I dyed up some samples and settled on three colors that I thought would look good together. Then I dyed half kid mohair and half lovely soft shetland wool and carded them together in my drum carder. Finally, I took the three main colors (blue, aqua and purple) and blended one batt of each with one other color to make color transitions between them. I wound up with six colors: blue, blue/aqua, aqua, aqua/purple, purple and purple/blue. Here’s a photo of the mountains of fiber that resulted:
Next, I spun up the yarn. The colors in the ball of yarn are transitioning between blue in the center, to blue/aqua to aqua. The skein has aqua/purple, purple and purple/blue.
Blue yarn
Blue and purple yarn
Then I picked a pattern for the scarf. I wanted a nice cable going down the middle for some interest, and found one I liked in “Viking Knits” by Elsebeth Lavold. So far I’m very pleased with how the scarf looks and the colors. I’m only about a 8″ into the scarf, and I finished knitting one blue section and am in the middle of a blue/aqua section. I think the colors flow into each other nicely:
scarf
I’ll post more photos once I can find time to get some more knitting done.
