I'm working on putting together a little tutorial on how I calculated the stripes and dyed the yarn (for those who asked - it's not sock yarn per se, but rather, just Dale Baby Ull, a superwash fingering wool. The superwash drinks up the Kool Aid smashingly well)...but in the meantime:
LET'S GO YANKEES!
Yankee navy blue: 3 packets Grape, three packets Berry Blue, sprinkle Orange.
Those virgins I sacrificed last night must have done the job:
It is not absolutely perfect - the pattern is asymmetrical, so mirror images will never quite perfectly match up at any point in the repeat. Therefore, the seam (or, I should say, the location of the seam) is quite obvious, consistent or carefully worked though the tension may be.
It's not awful, though, and anyway is impossible to fix without starting over or busting out a pair of scissors, so it's going to stay. Lazy? Yes. Twelve days until Christmas? Yes.
The scarf is a pinned 40" x 10" right now, and will probably grow an inch more in both directions when blocked. With edging, final measurements will be something like 45" x 15" - a nice lace piece to go once around the neck and gather with a pretty pin, or to tuck into a coat collar.
It seems a very real possibility that all my Christmas plans will come to fruition. Brave last words, I know...
Meantime, my Kool-Aid yarn is striping sort of spectacularly (it was sheer beginner's luck, so I'm not self-tooting too much):
But I can't get over how bright the colors are, particularly when compared to the colors in the skein:
I was going for a beach feel, Derek Walcott's bleached sand and sky and sun. It looked right in the skein, but knitting it up turns the sand color orange and the blue more intense by contrast. I should have thought of all this - the color wheel is tucked away somewhere in my brain, I'm sure, covered in an inch of dust - but now I'm thinking that I still like it. It even still feels sort of island-y.
Finally, I've come to the conclusion that this is the absolute ideal pattern for working with a self-striping yarn. The diagonal lines hide the joins amazingly well:
So clever. I'm just so endlessly amused by these - I could see myself with enough new socks in different dyeing experiment colors for every day of the week.
