I love felted tweed

I really do. For about a month or so I have been knitting myself a tweedy dress. Because some knitted dresses seem to sag rather sadly, I am working it at a reasonably tight gauge and it has been taking a considerable time. But I am enjoying the slow process of the knitting because felted tweed is such a wonderful yarn to work with. There is just something inherently wintery about it. It is also ever so slightly nubbly, marvellously soft, and a dream on the needles. And the finished tweedy fabric is a lovely thing to behold. I have been very struck by it’s pleasing matt, velvety, and slightly hazy quality in the many examples of Eunny Chang’s tangled yoke that I’ve seen on ravelry recently.

Anyway, the body of my felted tweed dress is knit in plain greeny-grey stockinette, and the sleeves and yoke are coloured in stripes, like the furrowed coastal landscape of East Lothian which inspired it. Having found a stripe sequence I liked, I then realised this involved either working with six colours at once, and stranding ’em in, or breaking the yarn and weaving in ends every few rows. Horrors! The colour work I’ve done before has generally involved using two shades simultaneously, with the addition of a different accent for maybe a row or two. Handling three balls of yarn is manageable and the weaving in of a few ends is not a particularly terrifying prospect. But six balls? Hundreds of ends? I am full of renewed respect for those who attempt complex intarsia patterns. They are made of stronger stuff than I.

I couldn’t face the ends, so decided to work with the six balls, stranding the colours in turn up the work as I went. To do this with minimum tangling, I devised The Kebab.

You see here the felted tweed kebab, and a half-finished sleeve. The balls are skewered on a fat 15mm needle, and are used in turn, moving from one end to the other. It’s a three-row sequence, and I’m knitting in the round, so I have to rotate the work anti-clockwise three times at the end of each stripe, to untwist the non-worked yarns, before returning the ball to it’s place on the skewer. The yarns not in use are stranded singly in turn up the work at the start of each round. They don’t bunch up or pucker, so this is working out fine. And best of all, the kebab is portable and can come with me on the train. As I say, this is the first time I’ve encountered this problem and I am intrigued by how other knitters solve it. Do they really weave in hundreds of ends? And what about working in several colours with a tangly mohair yarn? The mind boggles. . .