Cashmere and Lace

I’ve never knit anything lace before, but when I saw the Cold Mountain Stole in the new issue of Knitty, I felt like I had to knit it right away. At first I thought I’d have to wait a bit though – not owning any laceweight yarn in my stash. However, I remembered that I had a beautiful cashmere sweater that I snagged for $2 at New to You over Memorial Day weekend as part of my big reclamation project. I know I could have bought some yarn, but I’m trying not to buy any yarn this month and work on what I already have – my first yarn diet.

I spent last night pulling the sweater apart and winding it up. It was a bit tedious. For some reason one of the side seams refused to pull part and had to be cut bit by bit. This resulted in some cut threads along the side of the sweater. Also, the thread, being only two-ply cashmere in a very fine weight, had a greater tendency to break whenever it hit a snag, instead of just getting stuck. However, I persevered, ended up felting a lot of ends together and ended up with two skeins that come out to about 1200m of yarn, which should be plenty. Here it is all skeined up.

The color is pretty, but the lace pattern seemed like it would stand out more with a darker color, so I decided to dye this a purple color. I used some of the excess egg dye that I picked up after Easter. The color ended up being two purple color tabs, one red and one “denim.” I am way too impatient for any of the dyeing methods that involve super slow heating, but I really didn’t want to felt all that cashmere, so I did test out heat on some samples. Thankfully no felting. This next picture shows the yarn in it’s purple bath.

I heated the whole thing up very slowly, and kept it in for about an hour, until the water in the pot was only a pale blue. I dumped out the water and let it sit for a bit before slowly rinsing with hot water and slowly cooling it down. I admit that I did fear some serious felting after it came out of the water originally, but thankfully that look abated once I actually got some of the water out of the yarn. Here is a shot of the yarn laid out on the table.

As you can see, the color did not turn out even. It does actually look kind of cool, though this picture doesn’t do it justice. I actually think it has a bit of a variegated look that will be neat once it’s knitted up – or at least I hope it will. This was not what I intended whatever. Clearly I needed to mix the dye a bit better!

The yarn is currently drying on the back of the bathroom door. Having an extra center piece for my PVC niddy noddy has really come in handy. I can use the extra piece to hang up the yarn and the niddy noddy pieces to gently stretch the kinks out of the yarn.

I’m pretty excited to cast on for the Cold Mountain Stole. There’s already a Knit Along (KAL) on Ravelry, which I’ve joined. I’ve never done a KAL either, so this should be interesting. Between the stole and the Back to School Vest, I’ll have two big projects (for me anyway) on the needles, which will be good. That will give me something to switch to when one of them starts driving me crazy.