Real post soon, including a continuation of the Lace Triangle tutorial (and I found some places where the illustrations need improvement in previous posts, so I may return to those and tidy them up) but in the meantime, here are some images.
Saartje's Bootees in Wool Candy Meringue in Damson
Westknits test knit in Malabrigo Twist in Sealing Wax
madelinetosh Tosh Merino Light in Wicked
Last month on Ravelry, I saw this amazingly beautiful autumn colored Clothilde knit in a heart stopping blend of silk and cashmere. The colors are absolutely stunning, and when I found out that it had been dyed by the knitter who made it, I was more than impressed. That led me to explore more of Hasmi’s lovely yarns, which she dyes under the name of Rocky Mountain Dyeworks. The reds and greens in particular leapt out at me, so when the opportunity of a skein of my own arrived, I was so so excited!
With reason.
This is Bow Falls Fingering, a 100% superwash Blue Face Leicester wool. As you may or may not be aware, I’m on a BFL kick at the moment. I’m a late comer to the BFL party – it’s been one of the non-merino wools of choice for some time now – but I’m no less enthusiastic than those who arrived before me. While not as soft on the skin as merino, BFL is a smooth, soft, wearable wool, and significantly, it is a long staple wool while merino is short staple. The long hairs of the Blue Face Leicester sheep mean that there are fewer ends in a spun yarn than there would be with a short staple wool. Merino has softness as a virtue, but its sin is pilling and wear. BFL is a long wearing, hardy wool that will not easily pill or break.
BFL seems to spin up a little tighter than merino, at least in my experience, and this base is no exception. It’s a very firmly twisted 3 ply with a smooth hand and glorious saturated color. Oh, the color! BFL holds dye differently than merino, and it reflects more color back, giving it some of the same visual qualities of silk.
I wanted to have a gorgeous lacy swatch to show you today, but I spent too long on it, and the natural light, such as it was today, had faded before I’d finished. But suffice it to say that the yarn knits up well, with good stitch definition and little to no halo. Despite the firmness, the knitted fabric feels soft on the skin. If you compare it to a loosely spun merino or a cashmere, it will probably feel comparatively coarse, but that’s not really a fair comparison. This yarn actually has a similar feel to Tosh Lace, which is a tightly spun superwash merino.
This is a light fingering weight, and it would work best as a sub for other light fingering weight yarns, like Malabrigo Sock. If subbing for a regular fingering weight, it would probably be wise to go down a needle size to prevent loose, sloppy stitches, and to adjust your gauge accordingly.
I always find it fascinating how different dyers have distinct styles, and Rocky Mountain Dyeworks has a definite style that I love. Rich, saturated colors that recall colors found in nature. My red’s a semi-solid, but unlike many semi-solids, it’s not just one shade unevenly dyed. It’s several rich reds all working together. Lovely!
Finished some things last night. New things start today.
Keyboard still broken. Avoiding words with forbidden letters. Only photos, today.
This is the second part of my documentation of the process of my new design in progress, Sunniva.
As you may know, I have a bit of an obsessive thing about color. I loved color theory in art school, and rich color is very often what draws me to yarns. Lately, with my self publishing, I’ve had some ideas about color and about photography, and also about what I want to do and one thing that’s come up for me is that I like making two versions of my patterns, in two different yarns and colors.
In the first place, two versions means, very simply, that I get two chances to become familiar with my pattern and to smooth out problems I’m having. The first time through, I may find that my ideas are not quite what I’d hoped, that something that looked good on paper doesn’t work out quite as well in practice, or that a transition I thought would be easy is actually rather complicated. With real problems, I have to rip and rewrite, of course, but there’s something else, where maybe it all works just fine, but I come up with something else I’d like to try next time, I get to do that with version two.
Secondly, I’ve got this idea about what I want to be as a designer, and that has two sides to it. I like the idea of being able to highlight smaller dyers and unusual yarns, but I also think it’s nice for people to see a version of the project in yarn that is easy to acquire and might already be in their stash. Two versions means that I get to have it both ways.
And thirdly, two versions means that I can show you what the same pattern looks like in two very different colors. I am always amazed at how much the look of a pattern can be changed by just a switch in color, and I love the different moods that color can evoke.
I labored a lot over the colors for Sunniva. When I envisioned the sweater, it was yellow, but not just any yellow. It was neither a bright yellow, nor a pastel. It had some gold tones, but was more opaque and greyed out than a true gold. Finding this color was actually more challenging that one might think! I went to various yarn stores, looking at heavy lace weights and light fingering weights, and if I found a color that looked right, often it was on a yarn that was the wrong weight. I love Dream in Color, and their Baby was the right weight, but none of the colors were quite right. Finally, I found Malabrigo Sock in Ochre. It’s almost the exact yellow I’d pictured: perhaps a little deeper, but no worse for that. A nice, sunshiney, but not overwhelming yellow.
So I had my yellow and I swatched it up and all was right with the world. But when I decided I’d be self publishing, that was when things got complicated again. I wanted a second color. It had to be very different in mood and tone from the Ochre, and it had to still have some sort of spring-y, sunny-ish qualities to it. And most importantly, it had to photograph well with the yellow. Oh, and I wanted to get it from a small dyer.
I actually knew who I wanted to get it from right away. I’d been admiring Orangeflower‘s yarns for quite a while, and one of the things I really liked was the way the color looked so rich, but also sort of like it was drawn on, rather than dyed. Maybe it’s just me, but I saw it as looking a little like the yarn had been colored by hand with pens or watercolors. And I loved that. So I knew I wanted yarn from Orangeflower, and I contacted Karin, the dyer.
I hadn’t thought in advance just how much goes into yarn choice! I mean, I’d be laboring over yarns and yarn colors for months, but I hadn’t really considered how much work there really is until Karin got back to me with some questions about what yarn I wanted, and what gauge, and what fiber, and what color. Well, I knew the gauge and weight, but of course, even light fingering weight yarns can differ from one another quite a bit. And then there was fiber. Well, I wanted a wool, that was for sure, but I didn’t want merino. For one thing, I already had a merino yarn, and for another, I’d been reading about a lack of diversity in sheep breeds and the trouble that’s causing, and for a third thing, there are some fibers I’ve been wanting to try for a while! Oh, and of course, it had to be comfortable worn against the skin. Whoa. OK, deep breath. Bluefaced Leister? And luckily, Karin had some amazing Bluefaced Leister in the right weight. Gorgeous stuff, and smooth and lovely against the skin to boot.
OK, so we’ve got the base picked out. Color. Color’s the next step. This is the idea board I sent Karin.
Oh my goodness, you cannot imagine how ridiculously long I spent making this thing. Most of these photos are of fabrics, but I also searched Etsy, using the color selector, and Google and Colourlovers, and goodness knows where else. (The beautiful felt balls featured so prominently are from Smika.) The idea was to find colors that were paired with the same sort of yellow I’d used, and looked good with it. Each row represents a different color. And each color represented was one I thought might look good with the yellow and yet show something very different about the pattern.
All very well and good, but there are five separate colors represented on the mood board, and only one was actually going to be used. I pored over the mood board again and again, trying to narrow the field, and finding good reasons to use any of the colors. In the end, the top row and the bottom row were drawing me the most, and finally I picked the top row. I’ve shown this before, but the color is so gorgeous, I have no problem showing it again. This is what she did with that top row.
In real life, the color is even more rich and gorgeous. It shifts ever so slightly depending on the light, so sometimes you see more of the blues in the yarn. It is amazing. The Orangeflower BFL is intended for a three quarter length sleeve version of Sunniva. I’m trying to whip through the first version so that I can cast on the second, because I want to knit with this yarn so so badly. I love this yarn.
As of today, I am at the point on the first sample where I need to begin increasing for hip shaping. I intend this to be a rather long, almost tunic length garment, to prevent any possibility of accidental tummy reveals. I have a really long torso, personally, and most shirts bought off the rack leave some amount of risk that at some point during the day, there will be an unsightly gap between my pants and the bottom of my shirt. People, I have had three kids. My belly is so not the thing anyone wants to see, but shirt manufacturers seem to think that, “Hey, you know what’s awesome? Showing people Kristen’s belly!” No, no, shirt manufacturers. You are so very wrong. So I’m taking matters into my own hands, and this garment is going to be long enough, by the soles of my great aunt Stella’s shoes! With God as my witness, I will never reveal belly again!
Ahem. Maybe that last is taking things a bit far. But you see where I’m going with this. I’m not going to make this into a dress or a night shirt, but it’s definitely going to be long enough!
Oh, and I’m still on the first skein of Malabrigo. This stuff goes for miles.
So behind! Stitches and the end of Ravelympics came in quick succession, and I met up with a bunch of wonderful people and now I’m leading a Malabrigo March KAL (join us!) and working hard on a new pattern. And I’ve blogged about none of it. Because I’m sporadic that way. Now I just need to work on convincing people that sporadic is a synonym of wonderful.
Right! First things first. I finished my second Ravelympics project, the blue fingerless mitts mentioned last time, and they were promptly claimed by Mr. Kninja, who loves them and squeezes them and calls them George. He has worn them a lot since I finished them and it is because they are squishy and warm and utterly fantastic. Malabrigo, dahlinks, please, please, please release Dos next? Please? It’s such a nice yarn to use. I suspect that it will ultimately pill, but the ply makes it sturdier than the Worsted, and oh my goodness, it is plump and wonderful. Also, it has not grown the way my Worsted sometimes does.
Let us speak of M1 for a moment. There are, of course, many ways to make one in a knitting pattern. I have a favorite way, and I used it on these mitts. I’m very happy with how the increases look around the thumb, so let me see if I have a picture that better displays these increases.
There we go. OK, the increase I like to use is one mentioned by Elizabeth Zimmermann in one of her books, possibly more than one, but I definitely learned it from EZ. As far as I know, it does not have a mirror increase, so there’s a small disadvantage there, but I think it’s neat and clean enough that it looks good in all situations. Using the right hand needle, you pick up a stitch below the next stitch on your left hand needle and knit into the back of this stitch. It’s very similar to a M1L increase, but it’s slightly neater, and results in an almost invisible, tight increase.
Yeah, yeah, mitts, you’re thinking. Fine. But where are the pictures of yarn?? You are so impatient. Here they are!
I realize that compared to some other folks, this is a pretty modest haul, but other than in buying sweater quantities of yarn, I have never bought so much yarn at one time, ever, in my whole life. It was largely thanks to the generosity of some of my favorite knitting buddies that I was able to get this yarn, so I am very, very grateful.
I shopped with a purpose. There were a few projects I was looking forward to and I wanted to get yarn for them.
The above is Becoming Art Cielo Fingering in New Moon (Light). Isn’t is gorgeous? I’m not usually very good at working with yarns that have a lot of colors in them. I like tone on tone variegation. But Becoming Art yarns make me so so happy! Lisa, the talented dyer, manages to work colors that are very different into a harmonious whole, and her yarns knit up beautifully. I made a Clothilde for my mother in law some months back in this same base, and the bright purples and browns and pinks just sang. I got to meet Lisa, and she’s as nice as her yarns. At the time that I made my Clothilde, I thought that the yarn would work really well for a Milkweed Shawl. This yarn is for a bright autumnal Milkweed for me. I don’t know when I’ll have time to knit it up, but I cannot wait. The colors mean that every stitch is going to be a pleasure. The Fiber Fix has a lovely selection of Becoming Art yarns, too, and I’m really coveting the Outlaw and Wicked shades for future projects.
This is Little Red Bicycle Snowflake Sock in Cthulu. Yes, it really does look iridescent in real life. It reminds me of fly eyes. I almost didn’t see this gorgeous skein when I was in the Femme Fatale/Little Red Bicycle booth, but luckily my eye fell on it before I headed out with the wrong color in hand. One of my big goals for the year is to knit a pair of fingering weight socks and finish both of them. With that goal in mind, I was looking for a wool/nylon blend sock yarn in a color so inspiring, I’d have to finish my socks because I’d be so eager to work with the yarn. This is my sock yarn. I am in love with it. And Didi of Little Red Bicycle is awesome! I’ve actually been following her on Ravelry for a while without connecting her to her yarn, so it was really cool to meet her and to see the gorgeous stuff she’s been making.
Which brings us on to Femme Fatale, in the same booth! Liz of Femme Fatale is also the designer of the Traveling Woman and Saroyan shawls (and other pretty things), so you may be familiar with her work. The above is some lovely Lilith Sport in Poison Sleep. I was blown away by the blues and reds of the Femme Fatale yarns. This skein is for an exchange. It’s a full 400 yards, which I thought was pretty darn awesome! I was lucky enough to go into the booth in a slightly slower time, so I could stop and chat a bit. It’s going to get a bit repetitive as I keep saying how nice people were, but yeah, everyone I met was really freaking nice, and Liz was no exception. Perhaps next time, yarnies, one of you should punch me in the face to stand out in the later blog entry. 
Miss Babs Yummy Toes in Violet and maybe Peony, maybe Dahlia? shown with Malabrigo Sock in Violeta Africana, not purchased at Stitches. These little skeins are for the colorwork in Eleanor’s Paper Dolls Sweater. I’ve had the main purple color for a while and known that she wanted pink dolls and white or pale purple flowers, but I was reluctant to purchase whole skeins of sock yarn in pale purple or pink. I just don’t think I’d use them up. Now Nora gets her PonyPrincessGirlyGirlyGirly sweater and I don’t have to try to find a use for yards and yards of princess pony colored yarn.
Toots LeBlanc Jacob/Alpaca 50/50 Blend–Worsted in White. I have already used half this skein to make a hat, to be shown in a coming post. It’s so scrummy. In the skein and knit up, it’s very soft. Oddly, while knitting it, it felt very hard on my fingers, but because of the lanolin content, my fingers actually softened while I was working with it. The resulting fabric is strong and warm, but also very soft. I love it. It’s a sheepy wool, very satisfying to use. And I love my hat.
Malabrigo Twist, in Paris Night and Sealing Wax, for a hat for Mr. Kninja and a chance for me to try Twist and see whether I think it will work well for a sweater. Not much to be said. My love of Malabrigo is well known and this looks to be a very nice yarn, very squishy and soft. I am hoping it will not pill as much as Worsted, since it’s plied. We shall see.
I have more I want to write, but this is getting crazy long! I’ll conclude in a second post!
Say that three times fast!
My little sister’s birthday was yesterday. I had previewed her birthday present on here, but hadn’t dared show a finished picture in case she happened along and I ruined the surprise! (Which is my wont, anyway. I get so excited about gifts that I bubble and giggle and give everything away right then and there.) The present was, of course, a Liesl, and seriously, women in my life, look out, because this is just such a fun, fast pattern that I think it’s going to be my go-to gift for a while.
Erin wears a lot of black, which looks great with her coloring, and I wanted to make her a fun and bright spring cardigan to wear over her black wardrobe. I knew it had to be bright magenta, but bright magenta turns out not to be that easily come by. Apparently the world is not clamoring for crazyhappyfuntimes yarn of wackiness. Happy for me, I stumbled along the Blue Moon website and found the Backstabber colorway. The photos on the Blue Moon site are a little washed out, but Flickr is a great resource in this respect. Backstabber it was.
The pattern is fast and easy and awesome, and I’ve already talked about that here, so I want to talk a little about the yarn. The yarn is Luscious Single Silk (LSS), and it’s a single ply silk/merino blend. It’s very, very soft, and you get 500 yards to a skein, which makes it a great deal. I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, and I think I’ll use it again, but I think it’s worth noting that there are some problems with this yarn. Or rather, not so much problems as potentially problematic characteristics.
The Sundara Aran Silky Merino (ASM) I used for my own Liesl was also a worsted weight silk/merino blend. Since I used both these yarns for the same pattern in quick succession, it was difficult not to compare them, although the Sundara costs more than twice as much. It’s like comparing apples to apples that were grown by monks and lovingly sprinkled with the tears of orphans each morning so that they can charge you $5 an apple at the store. Or something. But the first difference I noticed was the color. Although the LSS is bright and beautiful, it is not as saturated as the ASM. There’s a different dye process, of course, and they’re not meant to look alike, but I had expected the yarn to look more saturated with color than it was. (This doesn’t show up in the finished photos, really. Check the side by side comparison shot below to see what I mean. The colors are very different, but the LSS looks softer.)
Second, the yarn itself is different. I don’t know how well it shows in the above photos, but the ASM is spun more tightly than the LSS. I think this is pretty important with a single ply. When I was knitting with the ASM, it felt pretty strong to me, and I never felt too worried that it was going to break, or that I was mistreating it. The LSS, on the other hand, untwisted very easily, and as I was sewing in the ends, it actually separated and came apart. I think the knit item is strong enough that it’s not a worry there, but it does look like it will show wear more quickly. I think Liesl’s not likely to be worn in any harsh ways, so I’d use it again for another Liesl, but for a pullover or a mitt or anything that will undergo a lot of friction, this is a serious consideration.
I don’t know if this is the yarn or my skills and equipment, but in the winding there was an unusual amount of tangling. I rewound from the cake, which is my usual solution when the first winding doesn’t go well, but even then it twisted and snaked and knotted and tangled, and there was a lot of rewinding by hand. I am not sure why this happened, but it may be worth a mention.
With all of that, it’s a nice yarn, and I liked working with it! I sound like I disliked it, but really, it’s gorgeous, inexpensive, and luxurious, and I’m glad it’s out there. I do think, though, that it’s helpful to note potential problems for other knitters. One more shot!
I’m almost done with my Azul mitts. The pattern’s fast and easy and pretty, and while I thought of it as rather feminine, Mr. Kninja is angling to get the mitts for himself, so it may suit dudes as well as ladies. (It may just be the color, though. The Azul Profundo looks a lot like this color we both favor for vintage cars.) It’s not an especially fleshed out pattern, so I wouldn’t recommend it to a knitter making mitts for the first time, but it’s a free pattern and it’s not going to be difficult to follow for anyone familiar with the process of knitting mitts.
Finally, my schedule for Stitches! I’ll be there most of the day on Friday, wandering around the market, looking tall and probably bewildered. If you see me, come over and say hi! I may be there Saturday morning as well, depending on how my back feels after Friday. So, so excited!
One last thing. I’ll do a separate post on this shortly, and add a button to the sidebar, but if you like both Arabella and Clothilde, you can now purchase them together for a more than 20% discount. Both shawls are available for $10 on Ravelry, under the name Two Ladies. As I say, I’ll make them available here, too, shortly.
I think I forgot to mention it here, which is sad, but I extended my Help for Haiti pledge through the 14th of February. Today I totaled it up and donated my second amount to Save the Children. It was $399.75, so I tossed in the extra twenty five cents to bring it up to a satisfyingly round $400. This puts the total for Knitting Kninja donations at $1238.25. Thank you so much for your purchases that made this possible! I’d never have been able to donate so much on my own.
I was going to wait until I was further along to show you anything to do with this project, but this yarn is so gorgeous, I have to share right now. This very minute.
This is superwash Bluefaced Leister yarn, dyed by Karin, the genius behind Orangeflower. I wrote her some months back to ask if she could make me a custom color for a design I’m working on, and we’ve been writing back and forth ever since, trying to get this just right. And holy cats, she did it! This is some of the most beautiful yarn I’ve ever seen. Depending on the angle and the light, the color shifts, showing more red or blue. The BFL is soft against the skin, but stronger than merino and with a sheen like silk. I am dying to start knitting with this, but there are a few things I have to finish up first. The first sample for this project is on the needles, though, and I hope I’ll be able to show you something nifty before too long.
Valentine’s Day was yesterday, and we had a quiet day at home. Two out of three kids have been very, very sick with matching lung infections, so the biggest relief is that everyone is very much on the mend. It wasn’t the most exciting Valentine’s Day, as a result, but it was a really pleasant one. I stopped by Joann’s Fabrics and got supplies to make little felt kitties with the kids.
We used instructions from an old issue of Craft. From left to right, you see Beatrice, Rondi, and the unnamed ninja cat, made by Eleanor, Liam, and Gabriel respectively. (With the occasional assist from Mom. Threading needles is hard for small fingers.) The best part of all this is that the eldest and the youngest discovered that they really, really enjoy sewing. Nora spent the rest of the day cutting out more felt and sewing a little bed for her cat, Beatrice. (Beatrice is apparently the daughter of Fleesa, who was introduced in this blog on Eleanor’s last birthday.)
Ravelympics coincided with the fact that I really need to get cracking on my sister’s birthday present, so that’s on the needles, flying along. I’m going to go ahead and post a picture on the assumption that my sister isn’t going to read this blog before her birthday, and that you can’t really tell what the present is anyway unless you’re familiar with the pattern. The yarn is Luscious Single Silk from Bluemoon, and I’ll want to do a post on the yarn later, because it’s been a very interesting knit.
Erin’s birthday is on the 23rd, and I think I’ll be finished with plenty of time. I have some other projects on the go, but they’re rather more secret than the birthday knit, I’m afraid! You’ll hear about them soon enough.
I hope you had a wonderful weekend!
Which is why I’m going to have to pick back about four rows of laceweight yarn a stitch at a time, when I’m almost done with a large triangle shawl. Oy. It’s also because the charts that looked awesome when they were just charts are not quite as awesome when they’re the edging to my shawl. Back to the drawing board Excel.
Other than that, things are sailing along pretty smoothly on the knitting front. On the domestic front, there’s been a little turmoil related to math homework (not mine) and I have laryngitis. But I also have this big-ass cake of yarn, so life’s not all bad.
When I say that I have a wonderful husband, I mean this: I have the sort of husband who calls me from work to say, “Honey, I passed a sign on my way to work that said, ‘Yarn and Fiber’, so I stopped off to see what it was, and it’s the store for A Verb for Keeping Warm! You’ll love it – I’ll take you on Friday!”
So on Friday, we took a pilgrimage to the land of beautiful natural dyed fibers and got to poke about and see all the lovely colors all in one spot. This, by the way is a very cool thing. It’s one thing to see some of the yarn on its own, but when you see it in the shop, all stacked and painted and beautiful, it’s amazing. We also got to talk to the owner, Kristine, who is just the nicest person, and who is supremely talented in the ways of fiber and color. (Also, though this is not appropos of much, Verb has my favorite logo of any yarn company. I am a sucker for good typography.)
It’s cozy in there, as one might expect, and the yarns…oh my. Kristine told us a little about the various conditions that affect naturally dyed yarns, which is just fascinating. Whether the water is alkaline or not can affect the colors that the dyes produce. You can read more about her process and ideas on the About Us page at Verb. The dedication to the natural dyes pays off when you see the beautiful and almost antique appearance of the yarns and fibers.
It’s not just the dyes, either. Verb sells yarns spun from undyed wool from sheep raised in Oregon. The Farm Series includes a favorite fiber of mine, Jacob wool, which I have to admit is not one I’ve actually used. I still claim it as a favorite, though, because the Jacob sheep is about the coolest looking sheep on the block (having anywhere from 2 to 6 horns), and the fiber feels amazing. And someday I will knit with it, dagnabit.
Of course, I didn’t leave empty-handed. I went with something specific in mind. I won’t be starting for a bit yet, but I have a shawl idea floating around in my head in two sizes, one in lace weight and one in fingering weight yarn. I have the lace weight, so I went looking for fingering weight, preferably in a light, antiqued shade. I got a skein of Creating sock yarn in Elephanta, a lovely pink/grey yarn that fit the bill perfectly. You are probably aware that pink is not usually one of the colors I’m drawn to, but the image of this shawl has always had one version in pink in my head.
I’m hoping to get around to more local dyers and yarnies soon! This was great fun, and I’m so excited to have a skein of something unique to this area to work with for a new design.
