There’s a 25% sale right across the board for the month of January!!

Check out the Merino Cashmere dk.  One skein is plenty for a neck warmer/cowl. and will knit to all standard dk patterns, such as this Herringbone Cowl, or the very pretty Frost Flowers Lace cowl, or 2 skeins for the large version of the wonderful Honey Cowl

Also check out the Big Softy.  One skein makes a wonderful Star Crossed Slouchy Beret, or a lovely Crofter’s Cowl.  Or use two contrasting skeins for a Newsprint Cowl, (all Ravelry links) which I’m currently making in silver grey and denim blue.  The Ravelry pattern search is a wonderful tool here.  I searched knitting-accessories-nock/torso-aran/worsted-0 to 150 yards and came up with 11 pages of possibilities, and that is just for necks!  I found 28 pages for hands, including Dashing, which has been in my rav queue for ages!

Now I must stop, before half my day has gone.  May just have to cast on for Dashing right now though – I haven’t got a little project OTN currently (well, apart from socks, but they don’t really count!)

Happy sale-ing

The Merino Casmere dk is now in the shop

Please note the slight increase in price.  The few older ones that were remaining from the previous batch of yarn are now slightly reduced and can be found in the Bargain Basket sale pages.

Patterns are still ‘UFO’s’ due to dimness of pattern compiler (me) who still can’t figure the charts      Soon, my little ones….. soooon……

These lovelies are currently on a UK tour, showing their faces at H-art and Ally Pally on my friend Anne’s Artisan Yarns stand, and they’ve still got one to go – FibreFlurry in Birmingham this weekend.  Then they will be joined by me at Anne’s open studio weekend in Hereford the following weekend.  They’ll then return to the fold to be put on my virtual shelves around 8th/9th November.

Here’s a little look…

Merino Cashmere dk, 212m per 100g.

And a sneak peek of some patterns I’m writing up to go with them, taking one or two skeins:

From the sublime…

Glisten, silk at 400m per 50g.

…to the rediculous(ly thin)!

Heirloom Gossamer, merino silk cashmere at a mere 2600m per 100g!

I seem to have a blue green thing going on

Oh, and keep it here for a Merino Cashmere dk preview!

Buttersoft has been around to shows with me in kit form, with Liz Thompson’s lovely mitt  pattern for a while.  I’ve got these little babies left, and also a few kilos left to dye at some point, so…. for a limited time only, Buttersoft dk is back in stock!

They’re diddy 50g skeins,  112m and made from 100% superwash merino, and there is just enough in one skein to complete a pair of Liz’s Berry Hill Mitts.  You do have to pay attention to the tension/gauge though as there is only just enough, and there may not be another matching skein to complete them if you do run out.

If  you order any Buttersoft, and want me to include the free pattern, re-written specially for my yarn , just add a message when you order.

Here endeth the update 

Yup, I’m dreaming fibre at the moment!  I’m spinning for a TappanZee, and, frustratingly, have not finished yet.  Life keeps getting in the way, and I really want to start the knitting!  There’s a spin/knit along in the Spunky Eclectic group on Rav specially for us wot ‘aven’t done a whole hanspun sweater before, and are scared stiff of it being a yukky misfit after all that work. Hand holding at it’s best!

Anyhoo, I have some new fibre for the shop, and I’m proud to present my new Shetland to you.  It’s lovely and springy and comes from Shetland sheep living on the Shetland Isles.  I have a natural coloured base and a Moorit base, which is a warm reddish brown.  I’ve dyed some of the Moorit first, as I was eager to see how the colours would work.

I am now dyeing largish batches of each fibre colour. They won’t be repeated once they run out, but there is plenty for a larger project or two.

I’ve even thought of actual names!  This one is Damask on moorit;

and this is Slippery Rocks on moorit.  Moody colours.

Merino Tencel is also back on the menu and the first colour is..

…Summery!

They’re in the shop right now!

There has been some more spinning.  Did I mention I have joined the Spunky Eclectic fibre club?  No?  Well, I did, in October.  I’m loving having fibres that are a little harder to get hold of in the UK, and Amy’s colours are great.  The November fibre was long and lustrous Masham in a colourway called Emerald City, hard to get here even though Masham town itself isn’t a million miles away.  Pondersom.

Anyhoo, this is my first SE spin and I decided I wanted big warm legwarmers to stop my lower reaches turning to stone in my chilly kitchen when I ‘m standing dyeing for hours on end. and here it is..

I tried for one ply spun thick and thin, and the other spun more evenly, and I think it worked!  It’s a very bulky yarn but I cant tell you just how bulky, as I haven’t measured it yet.  Just to give an idea, there is 3/4 lb here, or 314g in new money, and it’s nice and plumpy squooshy wooshy.  Now, I would cast on, but I have some more on the go.  The January fibre…

which is s/w merino bamboo, in Fruity Drinks by the Pool.  I am spinning insey winsey teeny tiny singles, probably the finest I have spun, to make a 3ply light fingering weight sock yarn (I hope!).  It’s a lot of spinning!  And I am enjoying every inch of it.  One and a half bobbins has taken just a leeetle bit longer than the entire Fat Fat yarn above ;p.  This first bobbin is just split in two lengthways for long colour runs, and the second, which is on the wheel, is stripped down to about 10 thin strips for really short colour runs.  The third will be short runs too.  I am so looking  forward to casting on and seeing how the colours fall, unless of course, another spinning project just happens along….

Happy things

Yarn Forward this month (issue 35) has another pattern in APY!!! It’s the Drops Sweater by Shweta Shankar Khatri.  I was slightly caught on the hop with this one.  Yarn was supplied ages ago at IKnit in September and had heard nothing since, sooo…. there was no yarn in the shop :$.  Much dyeing later, and there is!

I was curious how the two yarns would work together.  There is the thick, soft and heavily drapey aran, drapey because of all the alpaca and bamboo in it, and the thin and bouncy merino silk heavy-lacewieght.  I haven’t seen it in real life, but it seems to have worked!  It reminds me a little of those drop stitch oversized sweaters that were around in the eighties, kind of gothic/punk, usually in black and very easy to wear.

Anyhooo, there is yarn in the original blues:

and some other options I enjoyed putting together..

The complimentary yarn bases were dyed together, at the same time,  for each colour.  Can you see how the dye takes differently in the yarns?  How  the alpaca yarn looks softer in colour, and the merino silk yarn takes up the colour more vibrantly?  Interesting to have a direct comparisson, methinks.

And I had an aran sweater in my head with a grey body and maize fairisle yoke……

hmmmmm……

May I introduce you to Rocio, a beautiful silk stole designed by the very talented Ruth Garcia-Alcantud, appearing in this month’s Yarn Forward magazine (issue 35).  The stole uses just 2 skeins of Glisten, shown here in colour G7075.  Or why not try it in the blue-purple of G7081 or perhaps the pinks of G7078, summery oranges of G7071…….?

Ruth has other lovely stole, shawl and sock patterns, amongst other things, on her website and in her Ravelry store.

I’ve also been dyeing more yarn for the popular Damson Cowl pattern by Kirstie McLeod in issue 26 of  The Knitter.  It’s MC1002#2, Merino Cashmere dk, but you might also be inspired by the subtle colour changes in MC1009, or the bright MC1006….

Happy knitting

I’ve got the spinning bug real bad.  I’ve been quite taken up with thinkng about the spinning possibilites within a single bump of fibre, and it can get me just a little over excited.  I’ve got quite a few little experiment-y projects to share, but I’ll begin with quite a straightforward one.  Here’s the fluff…bfl in F0008…

Bobbins full of singles.  Have I ever mentioned just how much I love bobbins of singles.  I love them more than fluff and I even love them more than finished yarn.  Here they are…worsted spun…

and here’s the yarn.  Roughly sportsweight, 2 plies and very squooshy, along with its teeny n-plied pup.  I have quite a collection of last-bits-of-singles-n-plied-mini-skein-pups.  When I’m 83, I’m going to sit and knit them all into a mitred squares blanket   I should have enough in this plump skein to knit an Ishbel for dtr, though I might do a Travelling Woman instead, just coz I haven’t done one yet, and dtr won’t really know the difference ;p

You will find a little fluff in the Fibre section, and there will be more soon.  Told you I’d got the bug