Deep Sea Bird of Paradise

It seems I am doing a fair bit of knitting for other people at the moment, people who need a cheer up. In this case for a Ravelry member who was given very bad news about her sight. Basically she had an awful lot of very lovely yarn and patterns she'd love to knit with it, but she was never going to be able to. So a call for knitting volunteers went round, and yours truly did indeed volunteer to knit the Bird of Paradise pattern. Lovely bottom up shawlette or scarf.

So I am sent the yarn and pattern and it came through and I am thrilled to find its an easyknits.co.uk Sushi Sock Roll. I can confess I have wanted to knit one of these ever since I heard of their existence. Long graduated colours hand painted up a pair of 50g sock blanks for a unique effect in whatever you knit. Obviously, socks are one use. But I have been interested in this kind of preparation of yarn and was over the moon to get the chance to knit with some, and see how they knit for myself.

They arrive looking like this:



Much as the name suggests, a lovely roll of knitted fabric made from scrummy BFL yarn. This is the Deep Sea colour way (see why the title now?). All squishy and fun. And then you undress it to this:



Now its possible to knit straight from the fabric, unravelling as you go, but I wanted to knit from dark to light, as this pattern is knit from the bottom up, and they didn't want to unravel that way, so they got balled up for knitting purposes. And doing that was rather fun, as my toddler son was fascinated by the kinks in the frogged yarn. He says its 'bumpity bump', as his favourite TV character says.

I did do some pattern tweaking. The pattern is written for a minimum of 300m of lace weight and this of course is sock weight yarn, and on the very edge of the yardage requirement, so I opted to shave off a couple of the pattern repeats, because going down a needle size for comfort wasn't something I wanted to do with an already thicker yarn than called for.

I have to say, by the time I reached the end of the lace section of the pattern I was utterly in love with the colours and the colour changes. And the colours are wonderfully vivid and luminous to say the least! And the adjustments I made to the pattern have made the colour changes fall so beautifully. Its been such an enjoyable process, knitting such a beautiful match between yarn and pattern. I can't even take the credit for the choice of yarn and pattern together. But its knitted up into a piece that I am truly proud of.



So that's another project done, now onto my more longer term projects and given them a good push for a bit. Till next post!