SW Merino, Bamboo, angelina, white icicle yarn

I just finished spinning the most gorgeous yarn from a fiber I purchased from squoosh.etsy.com. It's 75 percent superwash merino and 25 percent bamboo, white icicle and strawberry angelina. I spun this extra fine, laceweight singles and then plied them. After washing and setting the yarn, it's a sock or fingering weight yarn. These photos simply don't do this yarn justice, as the photos don't pick up the angelina and icicle highlights that really make the yarn pop.

Latest Weaving

This is a photo of my most recent weaving, a scarf done in a deflected doubleweave in 20/2 spun silk. It did not look like this on the loom, but once the fabric is removed and washed, the black and white threads slide into their respective places and plump up a bit to create the fabric you see in this photo.

creating with my computerized knitting machine

While I've been laid up with sciatica, I've taken the opportunity to create a new sweater design with Designaknit on a very old laptop connected to my Brother electronic 940 knitting machine. The easy part was taking a couple of designs from Impresario Fruits & Veggies that I had and designing the front of the sweater, then doing a sleeve with a simple striped edge. The difficult part was actually creating a useable swatch or fabric because of the long floats created by this design on the backside.

In the end I decided to use a doubleknit fabric, i.e., jacquard or colored full needle rib, which means I'm knitting on both the main bed and the ribber at the same time, to lock in the floats, as I'm knitting and, thereby, making a wearable fabric. I'm planning on making the back solid black, but also in full needle rib in order to match the weight of the front, as well as the sleeves, which will have a small stripe near the edge. I made a mockup in CorelDraw which is the graphic I uploaded.

Of course, the neckline will have something added to finish it off, probably just a simple knit edging.