Handspun/spinning goodies in the mail

Superwash BFL; DK weight handspun. About 600yds total

superwash merino, DK weight; about 600yds total

falkland combed top, 8oz of possibilities

4oz of merino delight

Shepherd sport; not handspun but still fun

I love when mail arrives. Especially when everyone else in my household is sick and I'm surrounded by crying people. That was the situation earlier this week. Now folks are fine. I avoided the virus.

New Releases

Just in time for the knitter's Frolic in Toronto, I have released two new patterns featuring yarns by Waterloo Wools.

The first was originally designed for my SIL Corey as a bridal gift.  Hence its name is Corey's Stole.  The sample here, for Waterloo Wools, was knit and photographed by my dear friend heath3r (on Rav). I adore the blues.  Her bead choices were also more subtle than what I used for Corey's.

beautiful bride

The second was an expansion and reworking of fingerless mitts I originally made for my husband. His bike-riding fingerless gloves actually - complete with short finger holes as per his request; never again thank you.

The new design is called Winter Meets Spring. It comes with the mitts and the hats patterns (beanies and slouches).  Try as I might, I just could not wait for anything vaguely reminiscent of spring to appear outside this "spring", so I had to quickly photograph these in front of a painting (by my sister) before sending the samples to Waterloo Wools.

Fingerless Mitts - nice and stretchy but also snug.

small beanie is snug on my adult head. best sized for a youth.

medium beanie is my new/current favourite hat

You can never have too many...

... ways to cast on and bind off.
I though I knew quite a lot of way to cast on and bind off; more than the average knitter.  I probably knew more than a dozen cast ons and at least 10 ways to bind off - maybe more - but my new book has shown me so many more options.

Cast On, Bind Off - 211 Ways to Begin and End Your Knitting by Cap Sease is my new knitter-book-BBF. I've already been playing with my options while swatching for gauge, which made having to make a few swatches much more enjoyable as each was a great excuse to try a new CO and BO technique.

So far my favourite new simple BOs are the Icelandic and the Russian, which are similar to a suspended BO - but better.

Princess and the Pea

I love a good mystery knit-along.  I have yet to be disappointed.
I've knit a few mystery shawls and socks. [Rav link]
When I caught that Lily Go was having another MKAL in February I jumped on board and even bought her signature yarn for the project.  It was exciting to receive a package from Malaysia, where she lives.

I chose not to go with the featured purple colourway and opted for some intense Precious blue that I knew I could pair with some pink-lined, blue-glass beads in my stash. I discovered mid-way through that I probably would have had enough for the large (I knit the medium size), but by then it was too late as this is knit from the bottom up.

 

Silly me neglected to wear it today to Hans Christian Anderson Day at the local Scandinavian Cultural Center.  I hadn't even thought of it until someone mentioned that Princess and the Pea is a H.C. Anderson story. Granted, I hadn't planned to stay and attend the event after my eldest's dance class.

Variegated Play

 

I have a weak spot for variegated yarns.

We have a love-hate relationship because those yarns can be very difficult to work with.
They can pool in funny ways. They easily obscure patterns.
And yet I love them still.

rainbow goodness

So what is one to do?
Learn how to work with them.
Play with variegated yarns.
Know the limits of the yarn.
And be ready to frog and use a different yarn for a project.

Slipped stitches and twisted stitches usually work well for breaking up the potential pooling and for standing out.

Twisted stitches

Simple slipped stitches

Variegated goodness

Perhaps you wonder what possibilities exist for variegated yarn. Perhaps you have experienced how easily a stitch pattern (especially lace) can be obscured by variegated yarns. I've outlined some of my ideas recently for Annie Bee's Colour Riot series when discussing rainbow yarns.  Using a second, solid colour and striping or holding it double helps to subdue some crazy variegation.  Keeping things simple with "plain" stitches is good too.  But other times you want to play with stitches.

Perhaps it's time to play with a sampler.

That's what I did a while ago.  I didn't see much use for the leftover orange-blue-brown yarn I had after knitting socks, so I decided to test out some different stitch patterns with variegated yarn.

 

 
                                1                                      2                                   3
NOTE: These stitches primarily come from my stitchionary, which is an old Mon Tricot book half fallen apart that I inherited.

 L-R: 1) Stranding with yarn held in front over 2 slipped stitches and alternating where one starts the stranding.  The stranding makes those colour sections pop. You could do random stranding in this way on an otherwise stockinette body.
2) Right side worked as [sl,k,yo,psso]. You could space the repeat with some plain K columns for a ribbed effect too.
3) Alternating columns of slipped stitches with 2sts K, 1 slipped. This would be the same pattern used in the socks above in this yarn.
 

  2                                    3                                          4                                 5
L-R: patterns 2 and 3 visible.
4) Granite stitch (K2tog across R2; Kfb across R3)
5) Wheat germ (spaced out rows of K1, K1b) - nice subtle way to break up pooling



            5                                         6                           7                        8
L-R: 5)Wheat germ
6) Brioche (knit on a smaller needle because it creates a much looser fabric)
7) "fake" brioche, which is actually a K1Below ribbing (K1, K1b) that my stitchionary calls brioche. Since I know it's not true brioche, I call it "fake". Certainly it has a similar look.
8)  Grain of powder



   7                   8                  9                   10             11              12                  13
L-R: 7) K1Below ribbing
8) Grain of powder
9) Woven rib
10) Linen
11) Eye of Partridge
12) Tweed



     12                   13                                 14                         15                  16
 L-R: 12) Tweed
13) Diagonal tweed
14) Diagonal crossed stitch
15) Bamboo
16) Knotted

As you can see, I worked with a lot of stitches that weave the yarn, pass slipped or YO stitches over, knit below, and occasional purls.   There are so many more open styled stitches I could have tried as well (and have tried while trying to figure out what is in this sampler). Another sampler is clearly in order.

Earthy Hat

What could I do with 90m of mystery wool handspun yarn in an inconsistent lace weight? Start a hat.  I decided to simply start in the center, work a circle, and see how far the yarn took me.  Once I finished with the handspun, I went on to some fingering scraps.

I thought I was making an adult sized hat, but I've never knit a slouchy tam before and had nothing to compare my size with. It seemed a large enough circle until I got the ribbing worked up.

It will be a lovely hat for a child. My eldest tried to claim it, but admitted later that she probably wouldn't wear it because it's a spring/fall weight hat and she only wears hats when she absolutely has to in the winter.  (Excepting sun hats).

I'm not going to block it because I think it looks cute like this and it stretches itself on a head.
I tried to get a baby to model it for fun since eldest wouldn't.

But she refused to stop moving.Guess I need to spin more yarn to try a hat for myself.

Colours of a rainbow

It's no secret that I love colour and rainbows. And orange.
I've been thinking more about colours I live with, work with, and wear - thanks to Annie Bee's colour riot series.
There are a lot of colours I knit, spin, buy, wear (and paint my walls with - my former office at home was bright orange).
It should be no surprise to friends when I say I like to buy rainbow yarn.  It might not always be a full proper rainbow, but I like it colourful.
The problem is, sometimes that amazing skein or ball of yarn doesn't always knit into something equally lovely. And it's not the pattern/knitting that's to blame.
It can be a fine line between rainbow and clown puke.
Here are a few examples from my knitting history.

This ribbed blanket of leftover fingering weight yarns illustrates a broad range of colours in my stash.

It's easy to create a rainbow of colours with multiple balls of yarn such as I did with the custom-order rainbow witch hat and when I made up dragon finger puppets for my daughter's birthday.  (The center dragon was her gift.)

More often I like to buy yarn with the rainbow built in.

This striping Noro is a winning multicoloured yarn.  It's still a WIP stole (Takenoko pattern) - fine yarn on fine needles and simple (repetitious) pattern.  Self-striping rainbows are easy to work with.

Sometimes I like to mix things up, as with this stripped scarf of Noro and a solid black using my popular indecisive stripes pattern (it's a free download).

Early in my knitting lifetime someone asked me to knit a rainbow scarf. I didn't have a rainbow selection of yarns and a simple striped scarf seemed far too boring.  You could buy one of those at Walmart/Dollar Store for cheap (I know I'd picked up one at Claire's in a bargain bin for a buck).  I found this rainbow yarn at Romney Wools in Toronto on my first real yarn-shopping expedition. 

Knit up in a simple rib it made a squishy, soft scarf full of rainbow.

The extra skein sat in my stash forever until I used it for a squishacowl.

Variegated rainbows are not always so easy to work with. 
The rainbow lace yarn below was one of those "got to have rainbow!" purchases.

It required a lot of work to find the right pattern that would 1) not be lost in the rainbow and 2) would not turn my rainbow into clown puke.

I wear this little rainbow Antonia shawl a lot in the warmer months or when I need extra colour in my day.  The mesh-like lace separates the colours in lovely little berries while the lace areas with more solid space are sharp enough to hold their own.  There's no denying it's a bright, colourful, rainbow shawl and not to everyone's taste, but I feel confident that it is not clown puke.

This sock on the other hand... clown puke. I gave the pair to my mom as "festive birthday" socks.  From my Rav description:

I was severely disappointed with the colourway! I saw a lovely pair of striped socks on display with these yarns and it looked like this colourway - but there are not any stripes in this yarn! It’s short sections of each colour blending together… aka clown puke.

Nevertheless, I’ve knit my mom a “plain vanilla” (or is that Rainbow Sherbet?) pair of socks and I’m going to present them as Festival socks - that is, for Winnipeg Folk Fest. These brightly coloured monstrosities (fit is nice, I’m talking colourway) should nicely accessorize her Festival tie-dye wear and keep her feet cozy during the nightly concerts.

I used some "Festive" leftovers to knit a Groovy Girl dress and shirt.  With the yarn held double the colours at least blend together a little better.  You would think I would have learned my lesson after this yarn, but the rainbow lace above was bought after...

These rainbow socks (in Kroy Clover colourway) are a lovely example of rainbow socks. They were one of my early knitting projects and still a favourite.    Another example of how nice it is to have self-striping yarns.

And then we're back to more not-so-easy colourful sock yarn. This yarn looked deceptively like self-striping sock yarn in the skein.  The problem is, you had to have a circumference of about 90 stitches for it to stripe - otherwise it's colour-blending clown puke, which I discovered on my first attempt to knit socks with it.

looks okay on the ribbed cuff

and then it's pukey

but wait, it looks lovely turning the heel

It looked fine at the cuff.  I chose a pattern to try and break up the colours, but that didn't help.  And it was as I was turning the heel that I discovered this yarn's potential to have a beautiful striped effect.  I started testing how many stitches it required - about 90 - but for the life of me could not imagine a project that would use that many stitches in a circle (not knit flat).  Not the right number for a cowl, not right for socks... and I only had one skein.

After leaving the yarn to wallow for a while, I did knit it into a pair of gorgeous Skew socks.  Yes, Skew is the perfect pattern for crazy variegated yarns.

Leftovers were used in simple squares:

My last example of rainbow-ish socks are these pastel beauties.  Yarn was gifted to me and certainly not my colourway so I gifted the socks to my sister who has a birthday near Easter.  I think the large sections of stockinette help show off the variegated yarn.

Rainbows are not just for feet and necks.
Kaylee Koigu bear is pretty colourful.  (And used my first purchase of koigu before I regularly started buying quality yarns. Seemed a mighty expensive bear.)

I barely remember my big girl so little. Especially in comparison to her sisters who were born with a headful of hair.

This striping colourful yarn made a cute soaker, until I realized that a soy blend was a poor choice. I know I frogged it but I don't recall what the yarn became after.

Oh, yes I do, a pixie hat:

Cute, colourful baby bottoms.  Too bad the short rows break up the pooling here.
Here's some colourful yarn I had kids dye for me that also became a soaker (for cloth diapers):

Rainbows also look fabulous on heads.  Here's what I did with the leftovers from Kaylee Koigu bear; a Kaylee Hat:

And this rainbow hat brightened up winter for me

Who wouldn't adore a baby in a rainbow pixie hat?

 And when you're feeling spunky... a rainbow pigtail hat.

This is my current favourite hat - a slouchy snail hat that is mine, not my daughter's.
This one is hers in Ribbon yarn she picked out and I designed a hat for:

That about wraps up my collection of bright, multi-coloured rainbow / almost rainbow knits (and crochet).  Oh, one last item - dolls always deserve colourful clothing.  Here double crochet keeps colours blocked together.