Fiber Week in Review: May 4-10

Once again, most of my crafting time has been taken up by the shawl collection as well as dyeing. But I do have a big announcement. I've started a Pubslush fund for the shawl collection as a way of allowing people to pre-order (in a way) the collection: Gawain's Shield: A Shawl Collection. I recorded a video in which I talk about the collection and share the three shawls that have been finished. Even if you're not interested in contributing to the fund, if you're at all interested in learning more about the collection, I hope you'll take a little time to watch the video. I'm almost to the halfway funded point (which is where I have to be for the funding to go through), so I am so grateful and thankful to those who have contributed so far--as well as though who will contribute.

Knitting: I'm almost finished with shawl #4. I did run into a snag--I ran out of yarn with less than one repeat of the border remaining! Argh. I'll be reworking the design so that it uses less yarn on the border (I don't want others to run out or have to use just a tiny amount of another skein), but for myself, I've thrown some more yarn into the dyepot so I can finish this one off as the sample. I'll work it again with the new numbers once I've finished the fifth shawl, but I want to be sure they are all completed in time for photography.

Teaser of Shawl #4

Spinning: I did a tiny bit of spinning on Sunday. I was doing some copy editing for PLY and got an itch for some spinning. So I spent about 20 blissful minutes working on the second single of the bamboo/alpaca I started a while back.

Dyeing: I've been working on adding the new colors to the shop and dyeing them on other bases. I've also been working on more self-striping sock yarn, but I've been frustrated at the transition between colors as they want to mingle a lot more than I intend and thus the transition is not "neat." I think I'm so worried about leaving white space that I'm instead making them way more overlapped than they should be. For my next batch, I'm going to worry less about white space since the color creeps up into the yarn anyway, and see if that helps. But I'm really happy with the way four of the new spring colors look together on one skein of self-striping, so I'll definitely be doing that one again.

More new colors as a result of playing around with the pink-red-orange spectrum

Way too much overlap in the pink/green created a dark grey section in between