Fashion: Yarn Style

Basking in the Glow of Stitches' Yarn Market

 

Recently, I attended the knitting convention, Stitches West, which was held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California. What’s not to like about gorgeous, hand-dyed yarns surrounding us knitters on all sides?

 

 

Miss Bab's Hand-dyed Yarns

The Yarnover Truck, a mobile yarn store from Southern California, had again a spectacular assortment of unique hand-dyed yarns from small companies such as Zen Garden. Sigh.

 

 

 

 

And then Southern Yarns had a giant selection of Handmaiden Sea Silk yarns, ranging from “Sea Silk” to “Flaxen” to “Rumple”, a bouclée silk yarn! Here is Rumple plus Sea Lace and Swiss Silk in light hand-dyed tones:

 

 

Next, there is Rumple and Swiss Silk in darker hues. Since my yarn budget was quite limited, I satisfied myself with photographing all these yarns instead of buying them!

 

Handmaiden also has some intriguing yarns with summer fibers such as flax and linen. Their Lino and Flaxen looked amazing, but I contented myself with looking this time.

 

 

Yoth is a yarn company that emerged last year as a huge hit at Stitches and they were back with much more stock! Their gradient sets, sold on gorgeous wooden dowels, almost sold out during the first day of the market last year. By the third day, their booth was almost empty.

Yoth is a family-run company from the Pacific Northwest, and their natural colors reflect that. I see the Oregon forests, rainy days, and stormy oceans that I enjoyed during my college years reflected in their yarns:

 

Occasionally, a bright sunny day took us by surprise, resulting in a "sunny day keg" celebration on campus. The Yoth colors pay tribute to those rare bright spots as well:

 

I held off from buying most of these yarns, not from a natural sense of frugality and virtue, but because I planned to stock up on vintage buttons from Unbuttons! my favorite vintage button booth, owned by Linda Sicard. She and her son are incredibly friendly and kind, and always go out of their way to help you find the perfect accessories for your special projects. And the buttons are so reasonable, I always buy a years’ supply of buttons there, so that I have just what I need when each sweater is done. Here are some of the buttons I purchased this year:

 

 

I stick with buying metallic buttons as well as black and white ones, as those are the most useful to me. And, of course, I bring my yarns and project plans with me so that I am not just wildly speculating--the buttons are all chosen to match a specific project, unless they are really spectacular, like the pearl cluster ones. I think those deserve to have a sweater designed around them!

 

I was also lucky enough to attend Lorilee Beltman’s Vertical Stranding class at Stitches this year. Lorilee is one of those instructors who explains clearly, step by step, punctuating her remarks with all kinds of references to interesting tools and techniques I would never have thought of! I would highly recommend her class to anyone who is interested in learning how to knit vertical lines without tackling a full-on intarsia project. Look at this gorgeous sock where she created a plaid-like fabric:

 

We created a sample in Lorilee's class to practice different vertical stranding techniques, and I made my sample into a caterpillar monster which I sewed googly eyes onto and stuffed and sent to my baby niece who is only a few months old. I purchased the googly eyes from the Stitches Booth of Kristen McCrory. She specializes in little knitted monsters and cute toys, and these black eyes come in different sizes--you just push them through the fabric and lock them into place with a back holder like an earring. Her etsy shop is named Kristen's Kords. Don't you love the eyes in this caterpillar/swatch monster?

 

 

To keep baby caterpillar from feeling lonely on the trip to Montana, I knitted a little friend from her using the pattern, Mini Kitty Pouff by Molly Rivera, from Knitpicks.

 

 

If you follow the “mini” kitty pattern and use the bulky yarn recommended, you will end up with a sofa cushion. By using dk weight yarn and small needles I obtained a kitty who really was mini, instead. I think he makes a nice companion for the little caterpillar, don't you?

 

But I digress. Lorilee Beltman’s class was a fantastic learning experience, and I am already applying the vertical stranding techniques I learned from her to a new project, but more about that next time. Lorilee promised us class attendeees a free pattern as well, and I have my eye on her Bold Move Skirt!

 

 

My MIL and I both fell in love with this skirt when we had the opportunity to examine it in person, it really is as beautiful as it looks! I even got to try the skirt on, and it is very flattering. 

 

Leslye Solomon

I also took Leslye Solomon’s class on how to use sewing patterns to create knitting patterns. That class was really fantastic, too! I have been working on my own for the past year to convert a sewing pattern of a jacket into a knitting pattern, and it was great to take Leslye’s class and hear the affirmation that I have been thinking along similar lines to a knitting expert. After all, I was just making it all up as I went along. Leslye is so analytical that she had a lot of tools to make the process easier, such as knitter’s graph paper for creating a schematic of your pattern pieces translated into knitting, and blocking wires to ensure that you could predict the size of your finished knitting pieces in a similar way to fabric.

 

 

The jacket I am making uses both vertical stranding and the techniques of following a sewing pattern, so I will blog from time to time about the adventure. In the meantime, here are photos of the yarns I purchased at Stitches West:

 

    There is almost 1,000 yards of yarn in this $40 skein of Handmaiden Silken

      Lace, which gives me way more yarn for the money than their other yarns. 

    I plan to use it to knit the pattern, Vivian by Jennifer Wood. You can find

     the pattern in her Refined Knits book:

 

 

    My other fun yarn purchase was a skein of Anzula Breeze to match the  

     Handmaidensilken I bought last year. The two yarns will be combined into a 

     lace summer top to match my pair of shorts:

 

I will use the Anzula linen silk blend for the body of the pullover--it is about 750

yards for a $30 skein, which was a much better deal than the other yarns I looked

at in the market. Then the silken lace yarn will be used for the lace accents to the

top. I will likely use the pattern, Silla by Jennie Atkinson again, with some further

modifications to the neckline.

 

Osaka: A Japan-Inspired Lace Cardigan by Sarah Hatton

 

 

 

 

Rowan Magazine 59 contains a beautiful story set in a Japanese garden,  complete with an actual knitted kimono!

 

 

Osaka stands out for me as the most gorgeous lace pattern in the book. I wanted to knit it immediately, and I created my own color scheme. The original pattern uses the colors Drab, Alhambra and Steel in Rowan kidsilk haze yarn, which makes it an olive, grey, and turquoise knit, in spite of the misleading pink color filter used in the photos.

 

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/osaka-2

Osaka

 

There have been a lot of disgruntled comments about the pink color filter in the photos of this collection, as the yarns in the sweaters look quite different than their actual hues. I do not mind a little creative license, but then I have a Rowan shade card, which I can use to examine the real colors of the yarns. For those who do not have this option, I recommend looking at the yarns in your local store before ordering them to knit any of the sweaters in this collection. There is a significant difference between the photos and real hues of the yarns in this particular set of designs. For example, the "pink" sleeves in the image above are actually light grey, the KSH color "steel". My sweater, however, actually uses pink, the KSH color "Majestic".

 

 

I assembled an old ball of Rowan kidsilk night, a metallic grey purple yarn, along with Kidsilk haze Majestic, Ghost and Blackcurrant to blend my colors. To me, there is nothing prettier than a grey and pink-toned color schemes with hints of a dark-toned yarn to frame it. The buttons I used are Victorian metal-coated glass with a flower motif. I purchased the buttons from my favorite antique button seller, Unbottons! at Stitches West this year.

 

 

This lace pattern was rather challenging to knit. I think anyone who has a fair amount of experience making lace will be just fine, but I do not recommend it for a first-time project. First of all, the pattern diagram in the book consists of sets of 10 stitches which do not repeat, so you have to track carefully across the entire diagram and each set of 10 stitches is different. If I had been really smart, I would have rewritten the diagram provided in the book onto graph paper, using sets of repeats that were the same over a much larger number of stitches. Instead, I just used a pen to cover each section of the diagram I had completed and used sticky notes to cover the previous rows I had knitted so I would not lose my place.

 

 

I started knitting this cardigan with the back piece, but another knitter in the Rowan group knitted one of the fronts first, which allowed her to master the lace pattern repeats much more quickly, as the piece is so much smaller that you repeat the lace rows many more times as you are learning it. I think in future I would take that approach. Beware of the fact that on rows 1, 3, 9 and 11, the pattern shifts over by one stitch so you have to move all your lace markers on the needle to the right by one stitch in the cases of rows 1, 3 and 11, and to the left by one stitch on row 9. This also means you reduce a stitch on one side of the shift and increase a stitch on the other side, so you have to track this and count stitches on each edge every odd row so you can compensate. Otherwise you will end up with an oddly-shaped piece that is quite assymetrical.

 

 

I added quite a bit of waist-shaping to this sweater, by just letting the stitches naturally drop off during the lace shifts on one side, and then reducing extra on the other side to match. I have to say that it even while knitting the last lace piece it was impossible for me to concentrate on anything but following the pattern chart section by section, row by row. I used a chart system and x'd each row I had completed so I would not get lost. If you prefer to knit lace socially or in front of the television, this is not the pattern for you!

 

Although this was a challenging design, the result to me is worth it. This is a beautiful cardigan that will be worn from years to come, and it is versatile enough to be paired with skirts, slacks and dresses. There are many more beautiful patterns to pursue in Rowan 59, but I think I will take a break from lace knitting for a while!