Social Knitting Inspiration Part 2

I let my idea from this post marinate for a while. Then I sorted another yarn box and found a lot more yarn which worked with the ones from my original post. Humm...since part of the reason for developing these projects is to use up stash as well as have some simple carry around knitting I think I want to plan a bigger project. Are you noticing that idea generation is a very crooked path? I've already bagged up some alternative yarns which would work for the caplet idea. Everything is 100% wool. The cone is lace weight but could be doubled stranded or combined with the two fingering weights since the Rowan is a worsted weight. I suspect some of you are questioning the idea of combining weights of yarn in one project. As long as the care instructions are the same for all the yarns it can be done. Choose a needle size to work with the heaviest yarn and make sure the yarns are well blended. Don't do any large areas of a single yarn and it works beautifully. The Dolly Bantry Shawl was designed specifically to blend yarns. I've knit four of them in the last two years.

I'm sure I have one or two more skeins which would work colour-wise with these. That's once I find them? I'll bag these up and put them aside while I work on the previous batch.

I'm working on a different idea for the blue, green and mauve yarns. It's a technique which has been rumbling around in my head for a while now. It's called helix or spiral knitting. I first saw this in Montse Stanley's Knitter's Handbook. I have the 1993 version. Techknitting has two posts on her blog about it and an article in Interweave.

I've also seen many hats and sock produced with this technique. 

Here's a few examples:

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/helix-socks-2

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/stash-buster-socks

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/stashbuster-spirals

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/stashbusting-helix-hats

It's a way of blending yarns in single row stripes. I'm off to do some more swatching, silhouette consideration and marinating for the first batch of yarn.