Melissa found this beauty at Dover Cards.
Damian would love to have one of his own, but I’m afraid he’d be a bit overeager about using the horn.
January 06 2009 | Beatrice and Curious Creek Fibers and FOs and Spartacus and Uncategorized and WIPs and Yarn Reviews | 1 Comment »
Remember the Smooshy I was drooling over?
Here’s the hat I knit up with it for my LYS, The Golden Fleece.
I’m calling the hat Orion, since the design looks like a belt of stars. The Golden Fleece will be giving the pattern away free with yarn purchase. (My friend Alice is graciously serving as hat model.)
Melissa did the pattern layout, and we included some shots of the stranding in action. My goal was to write it clearly enough that someone who’s never knit with two colors before would feel comfortable taking this hat on as a first stranded project. That’s also why I went with a single band of colorwork. I figured that stranding while decreasing and using double-points wouldn’t be beginner-friendly. (Leastways, that combination sure didn’t feel feel friendly to me when I was trying to do it all for the first time last spring!) I was also aiming for a unisex pattern, so that it could fill a variety of needs.
The skeins are very generous (450 yards each), so I have lots of yarn left over to play with, and I haven’t decided yet what I’ll make. Fingerless gloves? Something lacy? Another hat? Lace for edging pillow cases? (The yarn is superwash.)
December 23 2007 | Design Projects and The Golden Fleece | 2 Comments »
Here are the yummy skeins I got from Curious Creek Fibers.
Left to right you can see Arusha in Early Sunset (50% silk, 50% merino), Etosha in Sunrise on Daffodils (90% kid mohair, 10% nylon), Omo in Savanna Grasses (50% silk, 50% merino), Oban in Tilting the Gizmo (50% silk, 50% merino), and Isalo in Anemone (100% silk). Not surprisingly, the photo doesn’t do them justice—the colors just glow.
I don’t want to say too much about my projects until they’re done, but I definitely want to go back to the strategy I used on my Santa Cruz Hat and write at least one pattern that can be adapted easily to any gauge.
Meanwhile, here’s a recent FO…
…my Cabled Capelet knit up in Malabrigo (Col China colorway). This pattern went quickly and easily (aside from a few problems with clarity regarding the decreases, which weren’t too hard to figure out). I ended the neck a bit early because it was already plently long enough without working all the rounds. I am definitely keeping this piece for myself, but I expect I’ll be knitting up another one soon for my niece. The malabrigo is wonderfully cozy under my chin.
December 22 2007 | Cabled Capelet and Curious Creek Fibers and Design Projects and FOs | 2 Comments »
Check out Curious Creek Fibers. Look at the yarns (if only someone would develop an on-line fiber fondling tool!). Gaze longingly at the colors.
I had the pleasure of attending a Curious Creek yarn tasting at Article Pract several months ago and got to meet Kristine, the genius behind these yarns. She’d brought wonderful things with her: samples of new yarns, one-off colorways, all sorts of swatches arranged in relational pyramids to explain the process of choosing a final colorway. I learned why red is a hard color to get in a variegated yarn: it sets at a different temperature than most other dyes. I got to see how colorways react differently with different fibers (look at Rock Grotto for a good example of this: in some fibers it’s downright vivid; in others it takes on a earthy subtlety.).
These aren’t the sort of yarns one throws into one’s basket willy-nilly, the way one can with, say, discounted Soy Wool Stripes at Michaels. (Actually, it feels a bit like heresy to be mentioning Curious Creek and Michaels in the same blog entry.) These are yarns that you choose carefully for a project that you know will be treasured.
Of course, I wanted to buy five of everything, and, of course, I couldn’t. After much agonizing, I wound up selecting some Autumn in New England in several different fibers (I’m a sucker for autumn colors, and the electric blue paired with the copper just makes this colorway pop) and single skeins in Birches in Norway, Sunrise on Daffodils, and Rock Grotto. I was checking tags and calculating which skeins would give me enough yardage to knit what sorts of projects. Could I get a hat out of one skein of Nakuru? Could I get two fingerless gloves out of one skein of Serengeti? Would one skein of Etosha be enough for a pretty scarf or should I go for two?
In the middle of my decision-making I said to Kristine, “You need some single-skein patterns to go with your yarns.”
She looked right back at me and asked, “Do you want to design them?”
“Yes!”
So after some back-and-forth with the email, I now have a box of yarns from Kristine with which I’m going to be cooking up single-skein projects (and maybe a thing or two that require just a bit more yarn than that) that will be available on her web site. I will be having very happy holidays, indeed! The colors! The textures! Joy, joy, joy!
I know it’s a bit of a tease to write about all this and then not provide you with a photo, but I promise a photo will be coming soon. I’m off to my parents’ house tomorrow and will stop by Melissa’s on the way up for a quick shoot.
December 20 2007 | Curious Creek Fibers and Design Projects | 5 Comments »
In case any of you are thinking Melissa is a brute for denying me the opportunity to buy yarn, allow me to clarify. She did get me to promise to hold off on buying more (with my inserted list of exceptions), but only after I’d been both celebrating and bemoaning the fact that I’d purchased a nice lot of Soy Wool Stripes and other basic wools that I found on sale at Michaels (thanks Mrs. H!). The celebrating part needs no explanation, of course. The bemoaning has to do with not having sufficient funds in checking and deciding to put everything on the credit card. I will pay it all off at the start of the December, but I’ve worked long and hard to get myself to purchase yarn with cash (or the equivalent) only, so this was a slip-up for me.
Melissa is actually quite understanding about my sudden, desperate needs for new yarns, needles, etc.—just as I am understanding about her sudden, desperate needs for paints, canvases, gigantic rolls of watercolor paper, and the like. We’ll save money by buying cheaper food and fewer cleaning products, thank you.
At the The Golden Fleece’s community knitting on Sunday, Carol showed me the new Smooshy Sock yarn, and I was instantly smitten. I am happy to report that she, Margaret, and I have worked out a deal: I’m designing a pattern for them in Smooshy in exchange for some of the yarn. So, if you’re local be on the lookout for the results. Here are two hints: I’m making a hat, and I’m using two colors, Cloud Jungle (370) and Gothic Rose (340).
Melissa will verify that I have been absolutely rapturous about Smooshy. The Cloud Jungle colorway, which is a warm, but unassuming grey grey at a distance, is marvelously rich close up—shot through with plums and greens and deep teals. It takes about thirty seconds of working with this yarn to relieve my nastiest post-work headaches. (Carol and Margaret were probably wise to work out this swap with me. They’ve created an addict, and I won’t be able to stop with the two skeins I currently have in hand.)
This has been a wretchedly busy time at work (see headache reference above), and to distract myself I’ve begun working on my queue on Ravelry. I try to knit from free patterns when I can, so my queue is essentially becoming my own customized on-line pattern book. I can click on the project, then go from there to fetch the pattern or to see what results others have had with it. I’m trying to be reasonable, so I’ve managed to keep my queue down to only fifty-eight projects thus far.
November 21 2007 | California and Design Projects and Free Knitting Pattern Sites and LYSs and Ravelry and Smooshy Sock and The Golden Fleece and Yarn Reviews | 4 Comments »
