Osborn Fiber Studio

Sometime in October of last year, I cast on a little strip.

I had picked out five colors of my hand-dyed sock yarn to put together into an All the Shades of Truth stole. The original idea had been to do it as a knit-along with my small knitting group that meets twice monthly. However, one person had already done it, and the only other person who really wanted to do it couldn’t find the yarn she bought for it, so… it was just me.

No worries, though. It was the perfect reading knitting, I was only at the beginning of my last full year of seminary, and (at least for the time being) it was a pretty portable project.

The first strip chugged along slowly. It took well into the new year for it to be even close to finished.

But it grew. Panel by panel, it grew. By mid-spring, where there was just one strip, there were now three modular sections.

A side panel. An end panel. Another, skinnier side panel. An end panel with my first bit of border. I would pick it up and put it down for months at a time, as other, more demanding projects had plain bits to finish.

 

Another end, and another border, taking excruciatingly long as the semester wound down. Then, toward the end of CPE and after, finding my brain so fried that garter stitch was about the only knitting I could do happily. A couple weeks ago, my first long side border.

 

 

One final push. A night of weaving in ends with the ladies who had inspired the project in the first place. A gentle blocking on the futon. And voila! It took ten months, but now I have a beautiful, earth-toned, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired stole. It will go with everything I wear, and I can say I dyed every inch of the yarn myself. Pokeberry, black walnut, black beans, turmeric – they’re all here. My dyes, that I experimented with and perfected myself – long before Mom took the torch to a higher plane entirely – all together in one work.

 

 

When I got home from knitting group, I said to my husband, “Quick! Take a picture! My outfit matches!” Never mind that my outfit will match almost every other day of the week, given my wardrobe. I was more pleased that I had earrings and a belt on. My husband had a long evening putting the toddler down, so I won’t blame him for snapping a few shots without getting off the couch.

I am quite happy with it. It will look cuter draped than it does lying flat, when it’s impossible to get all those glorious lines straight.

As much as it goes with everything I wear, at least for a while, this will go to live with my mom. She will be selling my sock yarn for a while, so she could probably use this as an awesome sample.

But whenever I do get it back for good, I’m sure I will still wear a lot of brown.