I showed my mother the yarn I dyed for ‘her’ EG scarf, though she doesn’t know that yet, and she loves it. Phew! Here it is:

I’m currently knitting a new swatch as the dyed yarn will probably not match the gauge of the undyed swatch. With luck, I’ll get to start the scarf itself tomorrow.

Here is a picture of the (almost-)dry bowl, with the colours looking closer to the real colours, and one of the yarn I used.

The next question is “Is it finished?” I rather like its simplicity, and the surface texture does add interest, but I’m wondering whether the swap recipient might be disappointed if I don’t embellish it at least a little. I think I’m going to try to make a couple more bowls before the swap deadline anyway, so if I do I’ll make those a little fancier. Pictures to follow when/if I make them. :-)

Since I last posted, I’ve been working on a knitted-then-felted bowl for an exchange on one of my lists. I’ve never intentionally felted knitting before. I made small swatches using various commercial merino yarns, and even knitting with merino roving, but I didn’t like the way they turned out.

In desperation, I tried some thick 2-ply handspun merino from a few years ago. I only had 65 yards of it, but I thought that might be enough for a swatch and a bowl. That swatch looked a lot better so I went ahead with the bowl. I knitted it like a round garter stitch dishcloth with short row wedges (here is an example of what I mean), but on the outside, I did a similar number of stitches of stockinette with no shortrowing, so that section gets forced up to become the side of the bowl and another 3 stitches for an I-cord edging to make the rim. The I-cord pulls in the rim, which I hoped would make a nice shape, and I think it has worked.

Here is the bowl before felting:

and stuffed with newspaper to show the shape better (it was too floppy to stand on its own at this stage):

and here is one after the first run through the washing machine:

It needed a second run to get it firm enough. By the time it came out the second time, it had shrunk from the original 6″ across the base section by 3″ high to 4.5″ by 2″. It’s not dry yet, so I’ll try to remember to post the final pictures tomorrow, along with the yarn I’ve dyed for the EG scarf/wrap.