A few days ago I finished the first sleeve of the Liqourish Allsorts jumper:

I just have to knit another sleeve, then join it all together and knit the chest-to-neck bit. In other words, I’m about half way.

Last night I finished the first Ribble sock:

Somehow I managed to make it a bit too long in the foot, so I lay awake last night debating whether it’s loose enough to bother chopping out ten or so rows and grafting it back together.

But the most exciting knitting-related fun I had recently was dyeing sock yarn. For the first time in months I had an entire weekend day free of moving stuff into storage, so I grabbed my SSYM, a 200 gm ball of Bendy 4ply, the sample pack of Landscape dyes I ordered a while back, and some old aluminium saucepans I use for dyeing.

I managed to get myself completely tangled up after foolishly trying to wind the yarn onto the SSYM doubled – taking it from inside and outside the ball at the same time. The two strands became hopelessly twisted together. when I tried to separate them again they were so tightly wound that I ended up having to cut them. However, I’d planned to dye 20 grams or so separately for heels and toes, so I used the cut off bit for that.

The SSYM needs beads on the ends of the pegs and a better support than the music stand. Once there’s some weight of yarn on it, it tends to tilt forward and the most recent loops of yarn fall off.

The first lot of wool I dyed was the blue/black one. I dyed the whole skein blue, then half of it black. It should knit up in alternating stripes of about seven rows. This was really easy.

The second batch was supposed to be a gradual change from purple to yellow. Unfortunately, the colour chart was a little out for the purple. It came out more like magenta. I ended up overdyeing with a bit of blue. The other problem I had was my short attention span. I was a bit tired of dyeing by then, so I nipped off to read knitting blogs, and kept forgetting to come back and wind more of the skein in, so the colour change goes in three steps rather than being gradual.

Note to self: do graduated colour dyeing first, before I get tired and distracted. Must get more dye in colours I like.

Verdict: I love the blue/black stripes, but not sure yet about the purple/yellow one. Can’t wait to try this again.