Red Things

Everybody has a favourite colour. For some of us, the favourite changes as time passes, as we are influenced by the surrounding world. Not me.

My favourite colour is red. I wear it sparingly, I don't have any of it in my home, and yet is is without a doubt my most favoured. When I was small, red was the colour I ran out of first among my crayons. Not wine, or purple of any of the greens, just red. All the other colours in the box played lip service to red.

I knit a pair of red socks a while ago, and I am cheered every time I wear them, but this is the first red I have knitted since. I can't wait to wear it. I'm looking forward to more work with Garn Studios Silke-Tweed. A really nice yarn, and my looking forward to it has nothing to do with the fact that right there before me on my table are two skeins of blue and two of golden yellow.

I like it for the feel as it knits up. Its has a fair bit of silk in it, 52%, so the first thing you feel with this yarn is the silks dry texture. The silk is not the smooth Georgette feel, it is the dryer tussah feel, reminding me most strongly of the slubby goodness of raw silk fabric. 48% of this yarn is wool so beside the goodness of the silk, there is the stretch of wool. It doesn't have the bounce of an average wool fibre, but the wool quality show up in subtle ways.
I tried to get a good colour photo, but the red keeps turning orange and it just sucks light and definition into itself. The black and white shows off the project better. I'm quite pleased at the way the texture and the tweed work together.

The rest of the weekend was devoted to knitting on the black socks. I have only an inch or so of cuff left to go, then heels on the pair. I'm so close to done I can taste it. There will be celebrating when I finish these puppies.

I spent the rest of the weekend checking out stranded colourwork patterns and thinking about how I am going to make the vest. It did strike me that maybe the vest needs to be plain on the bottom, and patterned on the top, as many Norwegian sweaters are. That would ease the problem of the pocket somewhat, but it will complicate the knitting in and around the sleeve.

There is lots to think about, and I can do some of that, while I am working on getting my gauge for stranded and unstranded knitting on a project. So pattern choice first, then the practise bag / gauge swatch and then onward to vest knitting.

And socks. I'm really looking forward to knitting socks that are anything but black. A nice green perchance? Perchance.