Fashion: Yarn Style

If I “Eat Locally” should I “Knit Locally?”

 

 

I’ve gathered two bowls full of Fuji apples from my tree and can’t wait to make them into pies! There’s something joyous about eating the fruits and vegetables from the garden outside, in spite of local varmints. It’s funny how I used to be on the side of the pesky animals in cartoon days until I started gardening myself. My babybear peach tree produced 3 fruits this year and I only got one due to ahem competition. Can you believe that in the early evening, as I stood sipping a cup of tea, a cheeky little rat streaked along my stone patio, rolling a half-eaten peach in front of him?  He stopped, took a bite, saw me staring at him openmouthed in horror, and took off, leaving his spoils behind!!!!!!!

 

I’ve given up on growing my own tomatoes due to those darned little guys, I just can’t bring myself to trap them. So it’s mostly swiss chard and herbs and roses which don’t appeal to the local menagerie. But I digress. This post is supposed to be about yarns and cultivating one's knitting life. Recently, my yarn choices have not been local. Since my husband is European, we travel at least once a year to Germany or France and I’ve been buying yarns there and bringing them home. At the Edinburgh Yarn Festival, I made a point of purchasing Blacker yarns and some Shetland wools, as well as John Arbon’s Knit by Numbers yarn. So I’ve been making a real effort to source local fibers in these exotic locations, supporting nearby sheep breeds or whatever, but never made that effort when yarn shopping at home!!!

 

Array of Local California yarns at A Verb for Keeping Warm

 

It was a knitting podcast that made me think more deeply about where my yarn comes from. Woolful’s interview with Rebecca Burgess of Fibershed was quite thought-provoking. Rebecca mentioned that California is the largest producer of wool in the US (approximately Three Million pounds) but only half of one percent of that wool becomes yarn! I was shocked! Apparently,so much clothing manufacture has been outsourced overseas that local mills have closed and the demand for California wool is so small that much of it goes into compost. If anyone is interested in reading more about this, they can access the link below:

Fibershed Nonprofit:

 

The mission of Fibershed seems to be to form relationships between sheep farmers, yarn makers, knitters, weavers, and other artisans to rebuild the chain that used to add value to California wool. I had no idea there was such an important movement going on in my state to bring back California yarn and woolen mills, and I’m really excited about it! My first step in getting involved was to pop over to a yarn store in Oakland, A Verb for Keeping Warm, to check out their selection of local yarns.

 

 Floating: by A Verb for Keeping Warm

I saw some really gorgeous yarns there, hand-dyed by Kristine Vejar, the store founder, and natural dyer extraordinaire. My husband picked up Floating right away, drawn by its softness and the beauty of the natural dyes. Floating is an alpaca, silk and cashmere blend, and I walked away with one skein. Frankly, I feel a bit overwhelmed, having discovered all these riches in my own backyard. Apart from a skein of Floating dyed with Madder and Logwood, I purchased a few skeins of yarn which I plan to knit with and blog about in future posts. Specifically, I got a skein of Verb’s new Gather yarn, which combines California wool and Arizona Alpaca, and two skeins of Twirl. Twirl is not made by Verb, but by Mary Sarley, out of her herds raised in Napa, California. 

 

 

  I’m really excited about sampling these yarns and finding out more about how I can support this home-grown California wool movement. In the meantime, I’m heading off to Paris in a few days for my yearly visit with family....

News Flash—Spindrift Rescues Brioche Shawl!!!

 

 

A round of applause for Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift! It saved the day!

 

Here is what happened: My Briochealuscious shawl, that I had labored over, was in distress. Panicked, I searched for a savior, and found it in the guise of Shetland yarn!  

 

You see, I was acting on advice from Nancy Marchant about the slipperiness of superwash wool. She has designed tons of brioche, and when comparing the durability of projects knitted in normal wool versus supwerwash, she discovered her brioche garments made with superwash or silk had lost their structure, lengthening to the point of ridiculousness.

 

Alas, such is the lure of indie dyed sock yarn that I went ahead and put some little panels in my shawl anyway, since the designer, Mowry, used superwash yarn in the pattern, so why couldn't I? Unfortunately, the brioche looked like a dog’s breakfast.  Clearly, only a superstar like Mowry could pull off the knitting in superwash, at least short term--Marchant says it's over time that the brioche will fall apart because those threads are so slippery! I guess mine just looked sloppy from the beginning due to my loose tension. 

 

 

Ouch! Doesn't that look hideous? After this disaster, I paired my pale blue Cross Creek sock yarn with a raspberry strand of Jamieson’s Shetland Spindrift to support it and keep everything stuck together. Marchant had suggested pairing a "wooly wool" with superwash if you insisted on knitting it in brioche. This was a vast improvement, but the area where I joined my edging to the brioche section  I’d knitted purely in superwash wools still looked really wonky--it's the green and white panel + trim:

 

 

I realized that green and white superwash band had destabilized the whole garment and joining directly to it wasn't going to work. Solution? I grabbed some cream Shetland Spindrift yarn and knitted 7 total rows of garter stitch with it and the raspberry to create a grabby edge I could attach my rick rack edging to. This meant I was adding a stripe section out of the pattern, but it worked perfectly! Here is a closeup of the new join:

 

 

 

Isn't it amazing the difference yarn fiber makes? Now my blue superwash sock is surrounded on all sides by red and cream Spindrift, which is truly acting as the glue connecting the sections. This experiment has convinced me of the wisdom of Nancy Marchant’s advice and I will never try to brioche with two strands of superwash again. You see, the superwash treatment strips the scales from wool fiber, making it impossible for the yarn to stick together as it did before. It seems the structural integrity of brioche depends on that sticking factor. So it will be Shetland, mohair or other rustic wools leading my brioche knitting now!

 

 

Cheat Sheet: yarns to avoid when knitting brioche:

 

According to Nancy Marchant, you should avoid superwash yarns, silk blends, bamboo and tencel/rayon. Stick with “wooly” wools and you will have no problem preserving and keeping your brioche garments long term.

 

Yarn Choice could Save or Destroy your Brioche Knits

 

Have you ever spent weeks or months executing a complicated project in expensive yarn, only to see it dissolve over time?  I am hoping to share information that will prevent this from happening to you in the realm of brioche knitting!

 

Knitting Fresh Brioche Book

Two weekends ago, I attended Nancy Marchant’s class on Fresh Ways of Knitting Brioche. It was an amazing class, and I am truly grateful to Vogue Knitting Live for hosting a yarn event close to me, in San Francisco!! I had only knitted a brioche hat and was insecure in my brioche

increases and decreases so I found Marchant’s class at VKL invaluable. 

And look at this gorgeous sample of one of her leaf brioche pieces!

 

 

Now pay attention, readers, because I learned a really valuable piece of information from Nancy Marchant. Let’s face it, she is the world expert on brioche knitting and after having designed and knitted tons of brioche pieces and seen how they wear over time, she really knows what she is talking about:

 

DO NOT KNIT BRIOCHE USING SLIPPERY YARNs!

 

Yes, it is true that two-color brioche looks gorgeous knitted in superwash yarns. But don't do it! Nancy told us that she had used Indie dyed yarns for the construction of all the projects in her last book or two, and she discovered that superwash yarn is too slippery to hold the brioche stitch together. Over time, the garment could lose its structural integrity! As an example, she described a brioche scarf she had knitted for her daughter that started off pretty wide and short. But because the scarf was knitted in two superwash yarns, and that yarn was too slippery to keep those brioche stitches stuck together,  over time the scarf became longer and longer and narrower and narrower until it was no longer a thing of beauty but a snake instead. YIKES!

 

 

To implement the brioche knitting skills I was learning from Marchant, I was knitting Andrea Mowry’s briochealuscious shawl, pictured above, which starts with garter and seed stitch before it works its way into brioche. The yarns, as you can see, are indie dyed: some olann sock lite, in pear green [Pear] some fuse fiber studio superwash merino [Pink Drink] and fuse sock [Verdigris], and the ivory yarn is Miss Babs 2ply toes. As I was knitting up the shawl, the garter stripe and moss stitch sections looked fine in the superwash yarn but the brioche section looked less stable.  Can you see the difference?

 

 

I decided that short sections of two-color brioche, held fast by surrounding sections of moss stitch knitting would probably be okay, but I knitted the green and white brioche section on a smaller needle. I did feel an entire rick-rack edge made of brioche would not be advisable to knit in the superwash yarn. The border of a shawl is an important structural component and takes a lot of handling so I wanted to ensure a firm fabric. Nancy Marchant advised that as long as one of your two brioche colors was a grabby wool yarn, you could probably get away with using superwash for the second color. So that is what I am doing. I have switched from my lovely fuse fiber ombre pink to Jamieson’s Spindrift, which is a tweed yarn. Do you see the difference in the fibers?

 

 

While it is true that the Fuse Fiber studio drink pink colorway is much “prettier” than the Spindrift, when I experimented with combining it with my other superwash yarn to form two inches of the brioche border, it was limp and droopy and I could see exactly what Marchant was talking about. The fabric looked unstable and I felt this brioche trim would ultimately loosen and lengthen considerably, warping the entire shawl. By using the spindrift as the background color of my rick rack and using my superwash yarn to form the knit stitches that showed, the Spindrift creates a frame for the ombre effect of the companion superwash yet sticks it together:

 

 

Unfortunately, the looseness of the join made by the slippery superwash

stitches at the border join looks sloppy against the spindrift. 

The difference is stunning, isn't it?  So I am going to unravel the border 

AGAIN (sigh!) and reknit it, using a smaller needle and tightening my yarn 

when using the superwash. If that doesn't work, I will scrap superwash 

altogether and use another spindrift yarn to finish the border, but

then the colors wouldn't match the rest of the shawl and the effect

would not be the same. Also, I ask myself it the brioche section 

in green and cream is too unstable for me to join this edge onto?

These are all questions I wouldn't have known to ask before.

 

List of Yarns to Avoid when Knitting Brioche:

 

According to Nancy Marchant, all slippery yarns are problematic. This means you should avoid superwash yarns, silk blends, bamboo and tencel/rayon. Stick with “wooly” wools and you will have no problem preserving and keeping your brioche garments long term.

Review of Lyonesse yarn from Blacker

 

 

Last March, I was lucky enough to attend the Edinburgh yarn festival with my husband and some of his family. While at the EYF market, I purchased only one batch of yarn for a garment, as my stash has been piling up of late. I had heard lots of wonderful reviews of Blacker yarns and the company founder, Myra, helped me pick out my yarn at her stall —what fun! I have always adored this mint green color for spring/summer, and I have been trying to knit more in warm-weather-friendly fibers since California has become so hot. So I chose this 50% wool 50% linen blend in dk weight to take home with me. It is called Lyonesse, and also has a 4ply weight.

 

 

The yarn is not particularly soft to the touch because of the linen content, but it is not harsh either. This is very important for me, as I find I cannot stand to knit 100% linen yarns. I used a square wood needle, the Knitter’s Pride cubix, and this helped me knit the yarn pretty comfortably. It got easier after a few days of knitting and after that it felt fine on the hands. The biggest advantage of a yarn with this much linen content is the way it shows off lace work. I chose the Vogue Lace Hem Top, and boy did the leaf pattern show up distinctly in this yarn!

 

 

Unfortunately, the short rows I knitted for my bust darts in front also show up pretty clearly. I will avoid knitting short rows in this yarn in a prominent place in future. Can you see the oblong of back and forth rows right over the bust? Because I knitted the short rows back and forth instead of in the round, they had a different texture from the rest of my knitting, which was  in the round. I am hoping that repeated washings will soften the lines there, but this yarn really shows details like that prominently. 

 

 

I am glad to say I found Mari Tobita's Lace Hem Top pattern enjoyable to knit. I adapted it by knitting the size small from the top down and adding extra decreases for the waist, then I increased again to the larger size as I was knitting from waist to hips to keep the intended A-line shape of the pattern. I altered the top because I find that baggy knits do not look good on my figure unless the yarn I’m using has a lot of drape, and that is not the greatest strength of the Lyonesse yarn, although it has some drape due to the linen content.

 

 

The greatest plus for me about this yarn is that it was comfortable for me to wear in August and September when it is particularly hot in California, but it was more comfortable on the hands when knitting than a pure cotton yarn. I will definitely make summer tops with this yarn again if I am ever lucky enough to travel to the UK and find it!