Last night I finished these:

The first of the feather and fan cotton ankle socks. I had to increase at the ankle by four stitches in order to continue the lace pattern right around the sock. Unfortunately, this made them a bit too loose around the ankle. I can’t frog and redo them, as they only just fit over my heel as it is (I have high arches). I could sew in some sock elastic, but if I do I’ll have to be careful to keep it on the outside as I’m allergic to elastic.

Since finishing my first scarf on the loom, I’ve been looking through the leftovers and oddments in my stash with weaving in mind. I found some wool I’d tried out space dyeing on. It was cheap wool, and I used food colouring, but I like the colours.

If it were knitted up as socks it would form stripes of green and purple, with a little blue here and there. Unfortunately it went from the thickness of 4ply down to laceweight when I dyed it, and it was never machine washable in the first place. There was also some thick single ply wool leftovers from a white chunky scarf and I started wondering if I could reverse what I’d done with the red scarf – use a thick warp and a thin weft. So yesterday afternoon I dyed the thick single ply with food colouring to match the blue in the laceweight:

While I was dyeing, I began to suspect the thick wool wouldn’t take the dye. I threw in more of the laceweight so the dye wouldn’t be wasted. Turns out two skeins of the thick wool took the dye well – in fact, they’re a bit luminous! They’re on the bottom rung, while the laceweight is on the top right. The yarn on the top left is my other space dyeing experiment. It had been an uninspiring combination of red, white, blue and purple stripes. I took the opportunity to overdye it with yellow. Now it’s more exciting… but not really the sorts of colours I like. Oh well.

What am I going to make? I’m not sure, to tell the truth. I’m just experimenting for now.