More colours in America...

Lizard Ridge squares 13, 14 and 15, pre-blocking. 16 is on the needles as we speak.

We may have a breakthrough. A colleague, (the Swedish Virologist), who is also working on Lizard Ridge has been looking at American and Swedish online yarn stores and apparently, in America, there are more colours of Kureyon available. We're going to investigate this possibility thoroughly as nothing would bring me more satisfaction at the moment than to finish the blanket with a different colourway in each block!

Here's a bit of my Christmas 2006 knitting. The socks were for the Resident Radiologist and were knitted to my standard heel-flap pattern in Artesano Alpaca Hummingbird, colourway pheasant. It's a DK sock yarn so the knitting went really quickly and it was lovely to knit with. The colours did pool slightly around the gusset decreases but I didn't mind this too much, and also, I don't really know how to stop it happening again if I ripped it out and started again. As socks, however, I'm not convinced. The yarn has no 'give' so the socks have to be exactly the correct size and are a bit stiff to put on. They're also handwash only which is a bit impractical and after their third wash, they've started to shed quite a lot of fluff. The RR assures me though, that they're really good to wear.

Even after knitting a pair of UK 11 socks from a skein, there was a fair bit left so I decided to check out the yarn's felting capabilities. I knitted this little box / tray based on something I saw on Mason-Dixon Knitting, then sewed the pieces up and slung it in the washing machine on a 40C cycle. It felted beautifully and I stretched it over a box to dry into shape. It's now on my dressing table for collecting all the bits and pieces I jettison at night - watch, earrings, rings coins etc. The only down-side to the felting is that the colours aren't so apparent in the finished fabric. The burgundy comes through strongly, but the green, especially, has pretty much disapeared.