Yesterday was Halloween, and here, we just buy a bunch of candy and rent a movie for the kids, and wait for the trick or treaters, who never show up. We just live too far out in the country, and it is more fun to trick or treat where the houses are closer together. We don't know enough people here for me to take the kids trick or treating, so we end up treating the kids ourselves. Which is fine, it's fun in it's own way. So yesterday, I treated myself as well, to knitting and dyeing. Progress was made on both my knitting projects, as you can see in the photo. I have to tell you about my favorite thing of the cabled project though....

It's this little twist cable. It is a two stitch cable, made by skipping the first stitch, kntting the second, then knitting the first and slipping both off the needle. You knit it that way every row. That makes it the sweaters very own, built in row counter. I have to believe that it was made up by some woman long ago to keep track of her rows before they had such things as row counters. If you can count by two, you know exactly which row you are on in your pattern at all times, and I think I am going to incorporate it into any cabled sweater I do from now on. I love it.

My major treat yesterday was dyeing though. I had borrowed from the library a copy of Yarns to Dye For (by Kathleen Taylor) and dyed this huge skein of yarn into self striping yarn. I keep thinking of different things I could do with this, I think the colors turned out brilliantly, and I can't wait to try it again. It was a lot of fun.

I used some of the leftover dyes from the self striping yarn project to dye this small 4 oz. batch of roving. I just took dry roving and poured the left over rust, cardinal and plum dye on, squeezing it gently to get it to saturate the wool. When I almost ran out of the plum, I just added more water, and so there are lighter and darker areas of that color, and it broke in very interesting ways. I can't wait to spin it up. I am thinking socks, (of course) but it is so pretty who knows. I really liked dyeing it that way, it was a lot of fun, not knowing exactly how it was going to turn out. I really enjoyed Yarns to Dye For, it told not only how to dye self striping yarns, but yarns where the color graduated from light to dark as well. I highly recommend it as a good read if you are interested in dyeing your own yarns.

by Jan