Doyle

Each year in July we go to a week long festival. The way that the festival is set up is such that each week day is color coded, starting with yellow.

At some point along the way I decided that I wanted a shawl for the evenings (which tend to still run cool enough to want a shawl)- one for each day.

The way that I spin I end up with little bits of fluff, left over singles from multi-ply projects, stuff like that. I’m too cheap to throw those bits away so at some point I started carding them together and plying them with a strand of natural colored wool.

That habit collided with the desire to have a shawl in every color.

The thing is, during last year’s tour de fleece I tried my hand at solar dyeing, and started my ripley project to have a skein of this recyled/garbage yarn in every color. It occured to me last fall that I could just have one shawl for this year’s festival- but have it be in a running color gradient so it would be appropriate for every night.

Thus Doyle was born. I have no idea what the yardage on this thing is, I took the very scientific approach of spinning between 75-150 yards for each skein, dyeing it, and then reserving a skein of rather ugly 100% merino to overdye to make up any difference between the halves. There’s much more green because I used that as the mirror point, and instead of splitting 150 yards in half I spun two full skeins to increase length on each half.

(Doyle has also been christened the chakra shawl…and I have never seen so many knitters come out of the woodwork when I was working on this at Brushwood on Saturday…)

Next recycle project- overdying the yarn yellow- I’ll start that at this year’s festival.

6 months ago- Merry Christmas!

Posted here (please scroll down), craft envy  postively splendid