STUDIO
I’ve had this idea for a while: dyeing wool nepps that I bought years ago in a wide variety of colors, and then spinning white wool with these colorful nepps tucked inside.
And then it hit me: is this how tweed is made?! And the answer is… YES!
So, it turns out I didn’t actually invent the process for making tweed… because it was already a thing. 😛
Oh well… I finally gave it a try! My main concern was: would the nepps actually stay inside the wool?
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To be fair, I haven’t dyed a skein of yarn in years, and I didn’t realize how much I’d missed it until now. While digging through the back of my yarn closet, I struck gold: a full kilogram of natural alpaca yarn. I originally bought it for a project that never happened, but seeing it there, I knew exactly what I had to do…
Or so I thought!
My heart was set on those tiny, intense speckles. In the past, I’ve always used the dry method: sprinkling dye powder directly onto the fiber. It’s the most effective way to get those tiny, intense “pops” of color, but I didn’t want to deal with the mess of powder dyes this time.
I decided to challenge myself: Can you get perfect speckles using liquid acid dyes?
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Stop ripping out your work! In this video you can learn how to pick up dropped stitches (knit, purl, and garter), fix twisted stitches, and tink, frog and more…
I still remember the frustration of my early knitting days. Back then, a single mistake felt like a dead end. I had so many unfinished projects hidden away, or finished pieces I couldn’t bear to wear because of one tiny, glaring error.
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If you’ve mastered the knit and purl stitches and are itching to try knitting in the round, this spiral beanie is your perfect next step.
The spiral might look complicated, but it is not at all: the “magic” of this hat lies in a simple mathematical shift.
You are working a 6-stitch repeat (Knit 4, Purl 2), but the total number of stitches on your needle is not divisible by 6. Instead, your total stitch count is (6 x n) – 1.
Because you are one stitch short of a perfect repeat, the pattern shifts by one stitch every time you pass the marker. This offset is what creates that beautiful, continuous spiral effect without really any effort!
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