my hair’s not even dry yet – true messiness comes later in the day

one day, many moons ago, i saw a pattern at my LYS that intrigued me. The pattern was for a gradient sweater by baabajoes. The pattern can be found on baabajoe’s pattern page update 2007: Nowhere! .

I had played with gradients before, though the success, or lack thereof, was limited due to the number of strands (just 2) and difference in colors. The baabajoes pattern calls for 3 strands of Wool Pak yarn, starting with all three in one color, then replacing one strand with the next color, then one more, etc.. This results in a bit smoother transition, if the color difference is not too great.

My LYS didn’t have the Wool Pak yarn, so i decided to use Cascade EcoWool (colors 8025, 8020, 8019, 8018). I called around town and one LYS offered to order it. I placed the order, got 2 skeins and waited for the other 3… and waited… and waited – three months or so. I called the LYS and asked and the owner called me back saying it still hadn’t arrived, but to call her if i still wanted it. Let me say that i am not a fan of fact obfuscation. If you forgot to let me know when the last part of the order came in, tell me. That’s okay. In any case, i called my favorite LYS and asked if they could order it. They could, and it arrived the next week.

Knitting around, instead of flat like the pattern, i zoomed along at 2.25 st/in.. The more i looked at the sweater, the less happy i was with the drop shoulders, so i ended up doing a round yoke (with back of neck shaping to boot, thanks EZ!).

Project summary:
Pattern: Basically my own, inspired by the rag wool sweater from baabajoe’s
Yarn: Cascade EcoWool
Colors: 8025, 8020, 8019,8018
Comments:
On color: I am not really pleased with the middle gradation. I have yarn to make this again, with just three different colors that are closer in shade. Brown-scale next time. Three colors will be less expensive and i had quite a bit of left over yarn on the first and last colors.

On yarn: Cascade EcoWool is quite soft and enjoyable to work with. It would be great single stranded for a sweater as well. It is a loose ply, i wouldn’t recommend it for anything where you want crisp stitch definition, but it is really soft.

On the sweater overall: This sweater is SUPER warm. The three strands plus the stitch pattern and loft of the yarn make this a perfect sweater to curl up with a good book in.

the other day i saw great light in our sitting room. The only trouble was that the range of light was so great that i would have either blown out whites or no detail in my blacks. It had been a while since i did any pre-exposure, and i could not find my cheat sheet, so i ran some tests. Here are the results:

more detail on the process if you click on the image

ironically, the shot i screwed up, and so didn’t mark down the details, is probably the best. You will notice that the greater the pre-exposure, the lighter the couch. This could be fixed in printing, but not fixing it serves better for the purpose of comparison.

The theory is that for each ‘zone’ on your negative/print, with 1 being the darkest and 10 being the lightest, you need twice as much light to attain that zone as you did for the one previous. So, if you need 1 unit of light for zone 1, you need 2 units for zone 2 and 4 units for zone 3. If you pre-expose for zone 3, in this example 4 units of light, and then expose that same film as normal, your low zones are affected greatly – zone 3 for example has received twice as much light, 8 units, which brings it into zone 4. The higher zones, are not affected as much – zone 7 started out with 64 units of light and the pre-exposure only brought it up to 68 units, not very noticeable. This shortens the range of zones and allows you to capture detail at both the high and low ends of the scale.