Spring Grass on cotton and bamboo cotton side by side

Color Me Surprised

Lindsay Lewchuk Announcements, Gorgeous Gradients (2020 theme), Pattern Related, Puddles, Yarn Leave a Comment

On Monday, these skeins were almost all knit up into this year’s MKAL design! 

Puddles standing on WIP
To get an idea of the size… Puddles front paw is on one wing and his back paws were on the other with still more shawl behind him – 44 inch span!
yarn from WIP

Today, this is what they look like.

yarn for MKAL
12 yarn balls all in a row, 2 different gradient sets see how they go

So, I decided to make some lemonade!  Before I started, I’d wanted to take a photo of the 2 bases next to each other and them promptly forgot, eagerly casting on instead.  But since both projects are fresh from the frog pond, I now have my chance to show how the color absorbs differently on two different bases!

Spring Grass on cotton and bamboo cotton side by side
Lining up “Spring Grass” in a row on the Unique Sheep Green Sheep organic cotton & bamboo finger base next to the Unique Sheep organic cotton petite DK base.

Have you ever noticed how different colors take on different yarn bases?  Both of these yarns from “The Unique Sheep” were dyed in their Spring Grass colorway.  One of them is 100% organic cotton DK and the other is 50% organic cotton and 50% bamboo.  Not just the sheen is different, but I was surprised to see a slight difference in some of the colors too. 

Where do you noticed the greatest difference?  The deep blue end or the vibrant green?               

Aside: the lovely dyers over at the Unique Sheep must have been thinking the same thing.  I attended their virtual show at Wool and Fiber Arts last weekend, and they debuted gradient dyes on multiple base sets – that’s right, a gradient dye color is dyed upon multiple skeins all of different fibers.  The results are really interesting!

Now that we’ve shared a glass of lemonade, I’m going to duck back into the design lab and rewrite this MKAL so that it’ll be something you’ll love both the process of knitting and the product of wearing. 

I swatched… a lot! And they were all liars!!

And if you’re wondering what went so wrong?  Well, that’s a funny story too 😉.  This draft (it’s not the first, but the one I got the furthest on) came out too long for how wide the wings were… by a lot!  The funniest bit, I swatched!  But that’s another story that I think I’ll save for the actual MKAL later this Fall (finger’s crossed).

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