Steve: "Johnny, What can you make out of this?"
Johnny: "This? Why I can make a hat...(or a brooch or a pterodactyl)."
-Airplane (1980)
After knitting the Stony Stream Shawl (designed by Stephen West), I found myself left with small amounts of colors left over from the Rhinebeck six pack that I had used for the contrast color. And so, with the above quote from the movie Airplane rattling around in my brain, I asked myself: What can you make out of this?
My plan has me using the most of color 1 (since I have quite a bit of this color) and progressively fewer amounts of each color until I get to color 6, which is the least of all. Now you could simply start with color 1 and work with it until you have used 14 grams (if you weigh the yarn ball periodically, you will know you have knit 14 grams when it weighs 13 grams because it's starting weight is 27 grams and 27 - 14 = 13 grams) and then move on to color 2 and work through each color in this manner until you have completed your hat. However, I find it more pleasing if the colors blend one into another a little bit instead of looking like wide stripes. Now, everybody has a slightly different plan of action for blending colors into a fade but I like to use about 1/4 of the yarn to blend on each side of the color by alternating rounds of the two colors. This accounts for 1/2 of the color (1/4 before the color and 1/4 after the color). The remaining 1/2 of the color is simply worked by itself without alternating it with another color. You can fudge this a little bit, a gram more here or a gram less there but it should be fairly close to the 1/4 - 1/2 - 1/4 rule. Using this concept my plan is the following:
Step 1: Cast on with color 1 and use only color 1 for 10 grams. (Note that, since color 1 is the first color, there is no color before it. So about 3/4 is used by itself and then about 1/4 is used to blend with color 2 in the next step.)
Step 2: Alternate rounds using 4 grams for color 1 and 4 grams of color 2.
Step 3: Use only color 2 for 5 grams.
Step 4: Alternate rounds using 4 grams of color 2 and 4 grams of color 3.
Step 5: Use only color 3 for 5 grams.
Step 6: Alternate rounds using 3 grams of color 3 and 3 grams of color 4.
Step 7: Use only color 4 for 5 grams.
Step 8: Alternate rounds using 2 grams of color 4 and 2 grams of color 5.
Step 9: Use only color 5 for 4 grams
Step 10: Alternate rounds using 2 grams of color 5 and 2 grams of color 6.
Step 11. Use only color 6 for 3 grams.
Fast forward two days (have I mentioned that this is a super quick knit?) and I am the proud owner of a gift-worthy hat that will soon be on it's way to my brother-in-law to keep his noggin warm. You can play this sort of fade your leftovers game with all sorts of projects (not just hats), depending on the quantity of leftovers you find yourself blessed with! Happy Knitting - Kimber
"She keeps Moet and Chandon in a pretty cabinet..."
-Queen
Let me begin by saying straight off that this may be my most-est favorite shawl that I've ever made! On New Year's Day a few weeks ago I cast on the Killer Queen Shawl designed by Mary Annarella of Lyrical Knits. I love knitting slip stitch patterns and I had seen this shawl while visiting another local yarn shop, Wooly Bully Yarn Company up in Springboro, Ohio. You would think owning a yarn shop would keep me from wandering astray into other yarn shops, but I'm just as much a yarn junkie as the next knitter or crocheter and this beautiful yarn shop always has a lovely selection of knitting books...so yarn AND books...really, need I say more? And to top it all off, the people who work there are always super super nice! When I mentioned that I needed a new shawl project, Marsha pulled out all the stops to make it happen for me, pulling out one model after another!! Really, if you like anywhere near Springboro, you should pay them a visit. Did I mention that it is in the super cute Quaker town that played a pivotal role in the underground railroad? Definitely a must stop sort of place, all round.
Anyhow, one of the shawls they showed me, which I fell in love with, was the 'Killer Queen Shawl'. The pattern calls for 635 yards for the main color and 470 yards for the contrast color of a DK or a light worsted yarn. However, I'm not a fan of heavy blanket-like shawls. Furthermore, slip stitch fabrics, like this one, tend to be even thicker because of the yarn floats on the wrong side. So, I decided to knit my shawl in fingering weight yarn. I've done this for so many worsted/DK/sport weight shawl designs and have always been super happy with the results. Since fingering weight yarn is thinner than the DK weight yarn called for in the pattern, you will likely want to drop down 2 needle sizes to create a thinner fabric with similar drape and fabric integrity. With thinner yarn and smaller needles, it probably comes as no surprise that your stitches will probably be smaller (this is not always this case, but it's a good bet). This is, again, easy to adjust for by simply knitting a couple - few additional sections until the shawl is a size that you like.
I knit my 'Killer Queen Shawl' using (2) skeins of 'Blaze' on Kashmir MCN (420 yards per skein) for the main color:
and (1) skein of the 'Glacier' gradient on Kashmir MCN (470 yards per skein) for the contrast color:
BASIC INFORMATION:
January 18th (tomorrow) marks the start date for the Stony Stream shawl (designed by Stephen West) knit-a-long. The main requirement is for everyone to have fun, and in the process, build some knitting community, add some friends, and, at the end of it, walk away with a stunning accessory!! What could be better?
I don't particularly care for rules, so we are going to keep them to a minimum:
COLOR PLANNING:
Several folks have reached out to me asking how to use the six pack set in this shawl pattern. The Stony Stream shawl design lends itself to many color layouts, and like many of Stephen West's designs, it is an ideal template for color experimentation. Below are some ideas for how to the layout of the colors in a fade set:
1. Butterfly Layout:
A butterfly layout is the color organization that David used to knit our shop model.
In this layout the colors are first worked in order to the middle of the shawl and then reversed and worked back out again to the other edge. David knit his model out of (2) skeins of Skye for the main color and (1) Metallica six pack. Whether you knit the colors Copper to Steel and then back out to Copper (as David did) or Steel to Copper and back out to Steel, is a matter of personal preference. It works beautifully, either way. The concept is easily extended to any of our six skein fade sets. If you number the mini skeins in the fade set 1 through 6, the mini skeins are used as follows:
Pattern Repeats 1 - 2........Mini Skein 1
Pattern Repeats 3 - 4........Mini Skein 2
Pattern Repeats 5 - 6........Mini Skein 3
Pattern Repeats 7 - 8........Mini Skein 4
Pattern Repeat 9 - 10........Mini Skein 5
Pattern Repeat 11 - 12......Mini Skein 6
Pattern Repeat 13 - 14,,,,,,,Mini Skein 5
Pattern Repeat 15 - 16......Mini Skein 4
Pattern Repeat 17 - 18......Mini Skein 3
Pattern Repeat 19 - 20......Mini Skein 2
Pattern Repeat 21 - 22.....Mini Skein 1
The pattern, as written, is for 22 repeats so this works out nicely. David's shawl was worked at a gauge of 6 stitches to the inch, in the pattern stitch and blocked. He had yarn leftover in many of the colors so if you wanted to play a bit of 'yarn chicken', you might be able to knit an additional repeat or two, depending on gauge. Alternatively, a hat or fingerless mitts knit in leftover coordinating colors would be quite fabulous too!!
2. Stripes Layout
Color stripes are the layout choice of Denise, who works here at Fiber Optic Yarns in materials. This is, perhaps both the easiest to plan and the most exciting to watch the progression! Denise is changing her colors whenever the whim strikes and, while all the contrasting colors are from a six skein fade set, the color order is random and the widths of the stripes vary greatly. Denise said she loves having the freedom of not having to decide the specific colors for each row in the pattern! Although Stephen West used a single color-changing skein for the contrast color, the effect plays out as a striped shawl (shown in the model photos in the pattern instructions).
2. Straight Layout
This is what I will be using for my Stony Stream shawl. It is perhaps the most obvious. I am using my six skein fade set in chromatographic order and I am beginning with color 1, knitting a fixed number of repeats and then switching to color 2 for the next set of repeats, and then color 3 and so forth until all 6 colors are used.
The colors I'm using are shown in the photo above and consist of 2 skeins of 'Misty Mountains' for the main color (larger yarn cakes in photo) and the 'Rhinebeck' six skein fade set (shown as six smaller yarn cakes). I'm planning on starting with the pale olive 'Eye of Newt' on the left and working through the colors, left to right as shown, all the way to the deep violet 'Nightshade' on the right side. The difficult part of this plan is deciding when to change colors because the colors used earlier in the shawl will be used in repeats having fewer stitches whereas the colors used towards the end of the shawl will have many times the number of stitches as earlier repeats (because each 24 row repeat adds 12 stitches to the total stitch count). In cases like this, I usually take my best guess at where to change the colors and if I run out of a particular color of yarn, I'm completely ok with switching things up and throwing in an accent color out of sequence. This can be really fun and almost always when this happens, I'm more happy with the switched-up shawl than I ever could have imagined. So, with that being said, my tentative plan for my color layout is:
Repeats 1 - 5........Color 1
Repeats 6 - 9...... .Color 2
Repeats 10 - 13.....Color 3
Repeats 14 - 16.....Color 4
Repeats 17 - 19.....Color 5
Repeats 20 - 22......Color 6
The pattern calls for 600 yards of contrast color and a six skein fade set has 840 yards so I know I will have enough yarn. What I'm not 100% sure of, is whether I have enough of color 6 to knit the 3 longest repeats. If I run out, my plan is to put in a few accent rows of 'Eye of Newt' (first color) at the bottom edge - I think it will call back to the 'Eye of Newt' repeats at the beginning of the shawl and add a lovely little pop to define that edge. Who knows? I may just do that even if I don't run out of 'Nightshade'!
Recently, during a trip up to my parents' place in Maine, I had a bit of time to think about and design this 'Spiced Honeycomb Cowl' as a little thank-you gift for knitters stopping into the shop during the Heartland Yarn Adventure (taking place the next 10 days). If you would like to knit along with us, you can find the pattern (for free) on ravelry here.
I had in mind certain criteria for this design:
1. It should be something that relatively new knitters would be able to tackle since I wanted to include everyone and I wanted something that everyone with basic knitting skills should be able to knit.
2. It should be something that didn't require a huge amount of focus and could be worked up as part of a 'conversational knitting' project. Afterall, it's a yarn crawl with friends, and we all want to be able to knit and focus on our yarnie-besties, right?). This second criteria kind of goes hand-in-hand with the first one, so meeting one meant that I could probably 'kill two birds with one stone'...poor birds!
3. It should be something unique. A cowl is pretty basic so that meant the stitch technique had to be novel in order to keep the project 'fresh'. There are so so many stitches available but finding one that hasn't been used extensively is a little more of a challenge.
4. It should be an accessory that can be worn multiple ways. This is just something that appeals to me - if I'm going to spend the time making something, it always seems like a bonus if you can wear it multiple ways.
With all of these qualities in mind, I settled on a stitch called 'honeycomb brioche'. The vast majority of samples on the internet worked in this stitch used a single color and worked the stitch as a flat piece, in rows back and forth. I adapted it to use two colors and be knit seamlessly in the round with a nearly-invisible beginning of the round so there is nothing to distract from the the pattern continuity.
Honeycomb Brioche is an easily memorized four round repeat, alternating rounds between a color carried in the foreground (creating the honeycomb outline) and a color carried in the background (creating the color inside the middle of each honeycomb). The front of the pattern created features a honeycomb motif, hence the stitch name, shown below:
In the closeup image above, the pale oatmeal colored yarn is the foreground yarn and the burgundy colored yarn is the background yarn. Although I chose the lighter color as the foreground yarn, if I were to select colors again, I would make the lighter color the background yarn since it tends to be cast in shadow since it is recessed behind the foreground yarn. Darker colors used as the background yarn tend to be much more difficult to discern.
When a gradient is selected for the background yarn, the effect is truly elegant (see the banner at the top of this blog post). Because of the reversibility of the stitch pattern, an I-cord edge (provided by and I-cord cast on and an I-cord cast off) frames the cowl at both the lower and upper edges.
The pattern provides basic instructions for both the I-cord cast on and I-cord bind off but there are also numerous you tube videos showing these techniques as well. For a clear I-cord cast on video check out Very Pink Knits' video here. I particularly like the I-cord bind off video provided here by Stephen West.
While this design is perfect for using a couple of single skeins of sport weight yarn that you might find in your stash, we have also put together some kits, available online, that coordinate a gradient (background color) with a solid (foreground color) shown below:
Happy Knitting! -Kimber
With color theory, like most concepts, it's best to start at the very beginning; after all, Julie Andrews tells us it's a very good place to start! Prior to even understanding the color wheel, the concept of homologous colors is not only straightforward to understand, but it's nearly foolproof in color selection for textile projects.
Homologous colors are two or more hues that belong to the same color family. This is a pretty loosey-goosey definition that is easier to understand by example.
If you choose your favorite color family - i.e., Blue, then ALL the blues are homologous to one another. That is sky blue and navy and cobalt blue and royal blue and grey blue and...etc...all are homologous to one another.
Projects made with multiple homologous colors tend to lend a more conservative classic feel to the piece, independent of the color chosen. Some of our most popular gradients are homologous gradients, such as Bramble (a deep black-purple through increasingly lighter shades before ending in a lilac) or Cherries Jubilee (a black cherry through muted rose and ending in cream) among others.
In the case of gradients, all the hues within the homologous color family are preselected for you. How do you select the hues yourself when they are in separate skeins? When the choices seem nearly endless? The most important thing to remember when selecting multiple hues that are homologous is that contrast (or lack of it) will play a critical role in the final piece. In order to make the colors pop, you will need much stronger contrast than you might if the colors were from different color families. On the other hand if you desire a more blended appearance in the knitted fabric, homologous colors with little contrast is the way to go. One way to confirm the contrast is to take a photo with your cell phone of potential skeins (or better yet swatches!) and then convert the photos to black and white. This makes it extremely easy to evaluate to contrast between the two colorways without your eye getting distracted by slight hue differences.
I recently knit the Mautinoa shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph for WestKnits. It was late winter - early spring when I cast the project on and I wanted something bright and energizing after the endless grey days of winter. I was craving orange like mad and thought a beautiful orange shawl would be the perfect accessory to pair with a charcoal wool coat.
Setting the photo to greyscale shows strong contrast between certain colors, 'Georgia' and 'Courage' for instance, and less contrast between others, such as 'Little Miss Sunshine' and 'Georgia' or 'Health' and 'Courage'.
The Inara Wrap, designed by Ambah O'Brien, is a wonderful template for playing with lots of colors. The design formula itself is elegant and straightforward with a simple lace panel knit with one (main) color broken up with a bit of garter stitch rows in a contrasting color. Once you reach the midpoint of the wrap, you switch which colors you use for the main (lace) color and which you use for the garter contrast, and work through the color pairings again. (Note that the pattern states to work backwards through the color pairings but to maintain the rainbow or chromatographic color order, you work through the color in the same sequence as the first half of the wrap. Like many things, it is actually much easier to knit it in practice than it is to describe.
When selecting colors for this project, it's best to select high-contrast colors so that the garter rows 'pop'. There are many ways to do this, but one of my favorites is to select colors across from each other on the color wheel, known as complementary colors. Below is a 'color wheel' created from the swatches of each of the colors in the 'Over the Rainbow' infinity fade set.
There are 14 color swatches in the color wheel. If each color is paired with the one across from it, we create 7 complementary color pairings. The pattern lends itself to addition of more colors, increasing the length by 2 sections with each additional color pairing. Because of the yardage requirements for the Inara Shawl, you will need a Some Like it Hot and Play it Cool six packs (one of each) and the Over the Rainbow Matchmaker Set.
Just a little side note that, because of the multiple items needed for this project, we have assembled yarn packs for each of the three infinity fade colorways that we currently carry and I have also given the links again near the end of this blog post.
Over the Rainbow Inara Wrap yarn pack
If you take out all the mini skeins from the sets above and arrange them in a color wheel arrangement, you would have something similar to the following:
Again, it's worth mentioning that each color will form a color pair with the color directly across from it. If we rearrange the colors above into complementary color pairings, we can better visualize how they will be used in the shawl. Note that I wound up all the minis for the following photo:
Looking at the color pairings above, it's apparent that there is high contrast between each of the seven pairs of complementary colors. The pattern is written for 6 color pairings or twelve sections, but it is easily extended to include 7 color pairings (14 sections). Each of the pairs is assigned a number, 1 through 7 and each of the colors in that pairing is assigned either 'A' or 'B'. Note that the 'A' and 'B' assignments are not arbitrary; the 'A' colors are all from one half of the color wheel and the 'B' colors from the other half.
Which color pair you begin and end with is arbitrary. For my Inara Wrap, I decided to begin with B1 as the main color and A1 as the contrast color for the first section. The second section would contain B2 as the main color and A2 as the contrast color. After knitting the first two sections, it looked like this:
I continued in the same fashion, keeping color 'B' as the main color and 'A' as the accent color and progressing through pairs 1 through 7, which brought the project to the midway point of the wrap.
After knitting 7 sections, the midpoint is reached. For the second half of the wrap, the colors used for the main color and the contrast color are reversed; color 'A' is now the main color and color 'B' is the contrast color and the color pairings are worked again in the same order, using A1 for the main color and B1 for the contrast color of section 8, A2 for the main color and B2 for the contrast color of section 9, and continuing on in the same fashion through section 14.
This color pairing technique works for any of our infinity fade colorway sets. The following pictures show how to lay out the various skeins in a color wheel.
We have put together yarn kits for the Inara Wrap for each of the infinity fade colorways we currently have available:
Over the Rainbow Inara Wrap yarn pack
There you have it! Happy knitting, my friends! -Kimber
Maybe it's because I am a yarn dyer. After all, I am thinking about color - and yarn - most of my waking time (and often dreaming about it when I'm asleep if you want to know the truth). I love color. I always have. My earliest memories include hours of scribbling with crayons, covering sheet after sheet of paper with color. For years I wasn't interested in drawing anything in particular; I didn't actually become interested in drawing objects until sometime after I turned 13 or 14 years old. But year after year before that? Whole tomes of scribbles. I would run through a giant box of crayons in less than a month, wearing all the beautiful little sticks of wax down to nubs. I was especially fascinated by the areas of the scribbled piece where the lines of different colors crossed one another and created a new color and, if I wasn't scribbling, I would often be found with my nose pressed up close to a scribbled piece studying it. It was the early 70s and my young parents (and much of the nation) were into freedom of expression so no one saw much amiss in a child dedicating several years to scribbling.
Fast forward 50 years or so and not much has changed in my color obsession. It's true that my colors are now dyes (not crayons) and my substrate is yarn instead of paper, but it's pretty much exactly the same thing -- open up a skein of yarn and you have lots of 'scribbly' lines of many colors. I am still obsessed with those areas where the colors overlay one another to create new hues. I love knitting the yarn up and seeing how the color changes in the knitted piece. How the gradient colorway slowly shifts colors row after row. Which colored stitches lay next to other colors. It's magical.
So it shouldn't come as a surprise when I tell you that I think of skeins of yarn the way a painter thinks of their palette of paint. I don't collect yarn for a specific project (although I will buy additional yarn for a project if I don't have appropriate yarn already in my collection). Instead, I collect an assortment of colors and weights that I then feel free to combine as needed. I am especially fond of color collections of yarn like the 'six packs' like the Acadia collection shown above. The six packs are fingering weight and come in six colors that you can use separately or together. Carry the yarn doubled and it becomes worsted weight. Super versatile.
Lately my favorite way to knit with these collections is to use them as color work in worsted weight sweater designs. Used collectively in a project, they make wonderful color progressions with 11 steps of color if you hold 2 strands together -- six steps from 2 strands of the same color plus an additional 5 steps from the intermediate combinations of a strand from two adjacent colors. A deep dive into ravelry provides hundreds of colorwork sweater designs using worsted weight yarn. The most difficult step of knitting one may be deciding which one you want to knit!! Last month I decided I wanted to knit a colorwork sweater for Rhinebeck. I knew I was very short on time, especially since I was working long hours in the dye studio in preparation for vending at New York Sheep & Wool. But, I figured, even if I didn't complete it, I could still display it as a piece in progress (which I did). I narrowed down my search to 2 dozen sweaters before finally selecting the Halibut sweater designed by Caitlin Hunter of Boyland Knitworks.
It's a wonderful design! Whimsical fish play together beautifully with the colors in the Acadia six pack. There are 64 rounds in the colorwork chart. Remember I said above that there are 11 distinct 'step's in the color progression for the six pack. It's pretty simple then to divide the number of rounds in the chart by 11 to get 6 rounds per color step (except 2 color steps will only have 5 rounds). Easy peasy!
I am using a worsted weight yarn for the main color of the sweater. It is perfectly fine to use 2 strands of fingering weight held double for part of your sweater and 1 strand of worsted weight for another. No, I'm not yet finished with my Rhinebeck sweater...I have 3/4 of a sleeve left. Yes, I am knitting like a madwoman on it since I want to cast it off before casting on for the 'Shadow Weave Shawl' knit-a-long starting on November 17th. Yes, I promise to post a picture of it on instagram when it's complete. If you happen to find yourself in our shop or our booth at a festival this next year, be sure to check it out!!
You are the proud owner of a new skein of our yarn! Congratulations! We hope you enjoy the color(s) as well as the yarn itself. If you are not going to use the yarn in the near future, we recommend leaving it in the skein where the yarn will not be under tension.
However, if you are ready to begin your project, then the first order of business is winding up the skein into a ball so that you can use it. There are many different types of ties used to secure skeins of yarn to keep them organized with the strands aligned and to prevent those strands from tangling. We use a figure-8 tie that is tied from the actual skein of yarn rather than using scrap yarn. These are often used by hand-spinners to secure their handspun yarn so if you are a hand-spinner, chances are you may be familiar with this type of skein tie. Because these ties are part of the actual skein, they stay put rather than slipping around the skein, which has the advantage of the skein remaining organized and tangle-free. This is an older and more labor-intensive method of securing the skein and most larger yarn houses no longer employ this method for their skein ties. But because it produces a nicer tangle-free skein for the fiber artist, we continue to take the time to secure all our skeins this way.
If you've never encountered a self-contained figure-8 tied skein, there are a few things you should know. Lay out the skein in a circle and inspect the skein to see how many ties are used in the skein. Most skeins will contain 2 to 4 ties. Our normal size skeins all have 4 ties, at the 12, 3, 6, and 9 o'clock positions (as shown below and denoted with the black arrows), while our mini-skeins have 2 ties each.
If you look closely at each tie, you will see that they don't simply wrap around the skein, but rather go through the middle of the skein. Hence, the name given to this type of skein tie; figure-8 tie.
One of the ties will have a knot, as shown in the photo to the left. This knot is the end of the skein.
You can either cut or untie the knot. If you choose to cut the knot, you will want to cut close to the knot on the side closest to the skein, through all 3 strands, being careful not to cut any additional strands. Done properly, you will have the small bit of yarn containing the knot itself, a few inch long piece of yarn which was the first figure-8 tie, and the rest of the skein of yarn, as shown in the photo to the right.
If you look closely at a figure 8 tie, you can see that it is not simply a 'bracelet' of yarn around the skein. Instead, one strand of yarn comes in (far right photo), wraps halfway around the skein, goes through the middle of the skein bisecting it, wraps around the other half of the skein, and then continues on to the rest of the skein (near right photo).
Once the terminal knot has been undone as described earlier, all you need to do is trace back the strand through each figure-8 ties around the skein. Once all the figure-8 ties are undone, you can wind the skein easily into a ball. To test if the ties are all completely removed, unwind a round or two of yarn. If should come away freely from the skein. If the skein appears to have a slip knot and pulls tighter while you are trying to wind it up, then there may be a figure-8 tie that is still partially wrapped around the skein. When this happens, it is usually the last figure-8 tie that has not completely been unwound - remember it needs to trace back the entire figure-8 path not simply half of it.
Don't want to be bothered winding up one of our skeins? Just leave us a note with your order, drop us an email with your order or give the studio a call and we would be happy to wind any full size skein at no additional charge***.
Happy knitting (crocheting...weaving...whatever your yarn passion may be)! -Kimber
***Yarn wound into cakes is not returnable.
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