Strawberry Chocolate Progression...

A few months back I saw the Yarn Harlot talking about cotton. That in and of itself caught my eye, as she's a self-proclaimed not-really-a-cotton knitter. I'm increasingly less so, wool is so much more forgiving and alpaca is far more squishy. Still, I was fascinated with the color progression shown in the skein and clicked over to Wolles Yarn Creations.

Color changing cotton is all she does and it's lovely! There are a lot of variety of shades and you can request custom blends.  Most of her blends come in two skeins --a light to dark and dark to light with the same shades. I threw her store feed into Google Reader (my new favorite way to follow Etsy store owners) and waited for something to catch my eye.

What came up was the Strawberry Chocolate. I have a friend who lives the pink and brown combination. As she's a beach bunny, cotton would probably be perfect for her for a small shawl. It'll be far more washable and usable than wool would. It's four ply and 480 yards.

Having successfully gotten through the Old Man of Storr, I thought that might be another simple but lovely shawl that I could knit without having to pay too much attention. This became my computer knitting.

The majority of Old Man of Storr is garter with increases, so I was waiting for the color changes to make things interesting . The plies aren't twisted together and that is a little creative. I'm using wooden needles with a blunter tip and, for me, has helped me fight the splittiness but it's still a challenge.


First we began with bubblegum pink. There wasn't too much of this, so that went pretty quickly.

Then I got to the first change. I wondered how she had done it, it was so intriguing to me, I was trying to determine what dying process could possibly have been used to create this gradual color progression. And then I reached it.

The first knot! The slow shifts in color are made by cutting a single ply and replacing it with a new color.  It will mean a lot of teeny little ends to weave in but as they are only single ply ends, it's not too much of a hassle.

I've progressed through two color changes now and am on two strands of red, two of pink, about ready to change to three of red, one of pink.  While you can see the shifts in person, the camera shows them far more clearly than the naked eye does...





Not sure how quickly I'll get it done. As memory serves I don't have that much more to go on the garter increases on the body.  Something like 20 rows last I counted. But at the moment my hands are fully cramping from delayed moving syndrome and I'm not entirely sure where I packed the project. I think it's in the giant hedgehog floor pillow.