Recently I knitted this cute little baby sweater for a friend who's having a baby soon. I still had some Falkland super wash yarn left after finishing Mara's blanket, so put it to good use. The pattern is Jeudi by Elisa Di Fiore and was a very easy knit. I think the original pattern is "vendredi", but it's written in French and I still can't cope with that.
Apparently it's going to be a boy, so a visit to the woad patch seemed in order. I now have woad growing in a few different parts of the garden so I was able to harvest quite a bit from "volunteer" plants first, meaning I still have lots to harvest here:-
Woad is considered a pernicious weed in some parts of the world, but if they're as useful as this one I don't mind if it colonises the whole garden. The farmer who owns the land all around us might not be too pleased if it spread everywhere though!
I won't bore you with photos of the dye process - I've posted lots in the past, so if you're interested in knowing how it's done you can find out in older posts. I'll never tire of the magical transformation from yellow, through green to this amazing blue though. In fact, it actually turned out a bit patchy, but hubby said it made it look more like old faded denim, so I can live with that.
This is the back view, which is equally cute.
For the buttons, I searched through my late mother-in-law's button tin which I inherited. I think they're pretty old. They've never been used, and were still stitched to the original cardboard. They had a sort of faded bit in the middle which matches the patchy sweater! Perfect. And I have two spare in case they're needed.
As usual, there was still some colour in the dye pot after the sweater came out, so I found a random skein of sheep's wool to put in there. It's not ultra soft, but I think will go well in socks.
