After finishing up the Liesl, I’ve embarked on a new and very different sweater project. Being a lover of scrap quilts and multicolored anything, I’ve been a fan of Jane Thornley’s designs for some time, but have never gotten around to buying a pattern until now. I was torn between the Seagrass Capelet and the Blue Sky over Sienna cardigan. After a lot of thought, I decided I’d get a lot more wear out of the cardigan, and proceeded to start picking every ball of green yarn out of my stash.

This is the original color scheme:

Here are the yarns I’ve chosen, all greens. Almost all of them are stash yarns, some handspun, some commercial, ranging from sock yarn to heavy worsted. I did get crazy and buy a couple of ribbon yarns and one sari silk yarn from yarnmarket.com (a place I go to drool over the gorgeous art yarns, but rarely buy from) to provide some interesting texture.

Here’s the first 2-3″ of the back:

It even looks pretty on the wrong side.

I love it! It’s insanely brainless knitting, and the color changes are totally random and up to me. It’s not really a carry-around project, unfortunately, because you’re changing yarns every 2-5 rows and hauling around a bag of full of 12 balls of yarn really isn’t practical in most situations. And boy will I have a ton of ends to weave in at the end, since a lot of the yarns are superwash and can’t be spit-spliced. I think it’ll be worth it, though! The coolest part is that she suggests using a few strips of fabric scraps as part of the “yarn” for the sweater, so I could end up using some quilting stash too!

Speaking of quilting, I used to be a pretty active quilter until I started knitting and then spinning, so once I moved and had my fabric stash unpacked, I bought a 60-degree pyramid ruler and decided to start on a Thousand Pyramids scrap quilt. My general vision here is to start with dark blue and graduate to light blues, have a sort of horizon line with some sunny yellows in the center, and then have the rest of the quilt in gradually darkening greens and flower colors, with deep greens and browns toward the bottom. I’ve cut out enough fabric now to do a proof of concept layout, to see if this is going to work. I grayscaled the colors in GIMP to see if the values were working out like I expected, and they seem to be.

I’m not good about ironing fabrics after prewashing them, so I have an absolute heap of fabric to iron before I can cut out any more pieces. I’m still not sure how big I want this thing to be…could go wall quilt, could go couch-snuggling-quilt.

My mom is still working on the black-and-handpun afghan, and asked for a bigger than usual dose of handspun in bright colors, because she needs more yarn as the circumference of the afghan gets bigger. I decided to use some of the dyed fiber grab-bag I got form dyepot.com along with some smaller amounts of my hand-dyed, and see what happens. There are purples, blues, pinks, reds, greens, oranges, you name it. This is either going to be the ass-ugliest yarn ever, or really really cool. The first bobbin is done and I have my fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, and I turned the heel on my poor neglected blue sock. I might finish this pair before Fall at this rate.