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.