Festiwool recap

Well, it's been a bit of a crazy weekend around here, what with Nordládda going live and heading up to Festiwool on Saturday! Allison and I were on the road before 7:00 am on our way to Hitchin, and we made it there in good time.

Stall is ready to go!

After a somewhat hectic set-up (poor Alli didn't get her breakfast until after the show opened!), we were ready to go! I hadn't been to Festiwool before, and was really happy with the space: it was bright, airy and well lit, even though the day was grey and overcast. We were right next to Third Vault Yarns, and I was very entertained to find that, just like designers, two dyers can come up with the same idea independently.

On the left, Porpoise Fur Holly Walk on Romney; on the right, Third Vault Yarns The Magpie on superwash Merino Aran weight squooshtastic yarn.

It was really lovely to see some familiar faces from Fibre-East, and to meet some Fibre Club members who are having fun with their club parcels! Thank you all for stopping by, and well done to those of you who were insistent that you really didn't need another hobby (but you do, come on, you know you do!)

There will be a big update on Saturday, 21 November at 10:00 am London time with lots of woolly goodness, including last month and this month's Phat Fiber colourways, and some new holiday-themed colours just in time for December. Happy spinning!

Nordlándda

Today is the launch of my new collection of accessoried, Nordlándda, from The FIbre Company. I'm going to be blogging about each of the pieces from the collection over the next few weeks, but I wanted to show them all to you as a whole.

By the time this post goes live, the patterns will all be available on Ravelry. I'll get them up shortly over here. In the meantime, I hope you like them! If you're interested, A Yarn Story is kicking off their #AYSWInterCablesKAL with this collection today, so come on over and join in!

ETA: the patterns are now up on the website, so if you'd like to purchase them without paying VAT, head over here! If you include your Ravelry ID with your order, I will gift you a pattern for your library in addition to email you the pdf. Thanks!

The Klee Collection

It's always fun to see patterns that I've tech edited released into the wild. The most recent of these is The Klee Collection by Renée Callahan of East London Knit. I tech edited two of the patterns in the collection - the Angelus Novus cardigan and the Twilight Flowers pullover.

Angelus Novus, which starts as a garter tab cast on

Editing Renee's patterns is always fun because she uses very interesting and unexpected constructions. I'm very impressed with the way her brain works, and while her patterns can be challenging to edit because she creates shapes in such interesting ways, they are never boring! I imagine the same is true for knitting them...

Twilight Flowers

In addition to the three sweaters in the collection, there are three accessories, each picking up on a motif from one of the sweaters. I am particularly enamoured of the Twilight Flowers Mitts, which uses the same eyelet pattern from the pullover to form a panel down the back of the hand. So gorgeous.

Twilight Flowers Mitts

Many, many congratulations to Renée for a fantastic collection - I'm going to dig up some yarn and cast on ASAP!

Lab Goddess Fibre Club October 2015

The first installment of the Lab Goddess Fibre club went out last week, and I've been eager to share it with everyone.

As part of the fibre club membership, in addition to getting an exclusive colourway inspired by a female scientist, you also get included with your package a mini-biography of the person, a walk through the development of the colourway and why I chose the colours I did. This very special first fibre club was inspired by Dr. Marie Curie. Really, could it have been anyone else?

Alpha, Beta, Gamma on Finnish

Marie (Maria) Sklodowska Curie

Born: 7 November 1867

Died: 4 July 1934

Maria Sklodowska was the youngest of five children born to two teachers – her mother ran a boarding school and her father taught mathematics and physics. When the Russians eliminated laboratory science from the curriculum, her father brought the equipment home for his children.

As she was unable to go to university in Russian-controlled Poland, Maria enrolled at the University of Paris, where she studied physics, chemistry and mathematics from 1891-1894. When she finished her studies in 1894, she planned to return to Poland, but she discovered upon a return visit that she would not be able to pursue her career there, again because she was a woman. She instead returned to Paris to pursue her PhD, and married Pierre Curie.

 Madame Curie’s dissertation work grew out of the 1895 discovery of X-rays. Her research investigated these rays emitted by the element uranium. She found that uranium rays (radioactivity) enabled the surrounding air to conduct electricity, and could easily be detected with an electrometer. Her further work identified two uranium-containing minerals that were more active then uranium in terms of their radiation; her hypothesis that these minerals contained other radiating elements led to the identification of polonium and radium in 1898.

In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Henri Becquerel, the first time the prize had been awarded to a woman. Three years later, Pierre was killed in an accident, and Madame Curie was offered his chair of the physics department at the University of Paris; she became the first female professor at the University.

In 1910, Marie isolated radium, and in 1911, she was the first person (and still the only woman) to be awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry for the discovery and isolation of radium and polonium. She remains the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in multiple sciences.

The practical importance of Marie Curie’s discoveries is hard to describe completely. The discovery of radioactive decay threw a monkey wrench into the understanding of physics and chemistry at the beginning of the twentieth century. The discovery of radioactivity has contributed to advances in physics, medicine, anthropology and geology, to name a few fields. In my own experience, radioactive isotopes are used extensively in the lab on a daily basis for cellular and molecular biomedical research, enabling scientists to answer critical questions about health and disease.

Sadly, our current understanding of the dangers of radioactivity were not known in Madame Curie’s time, and she died in 1934 from aplastic anemia, a blood disorder that was a direct result of her early, unprotected work with radioactive compounds    

The colourway:

Madame Curie is the first woman scientist I remember reading about as a child, and I was fascinated by this woman who refused to let being a girl stop her from doing incredible things. In developing this colourway, I wanted to recognise the life-saving consequences of Madame Curie’s work, but also the dangers inherent in radiation.

I chose a bright, leafy green combined with murky chartreuse, separated by darker obscuring shades, all of which is meant to signify the light and dark sides of radioactivity.

The name comes from the three particles that are emitted during radioactive decay    

Fait accompli

I've just returned from a trip to the post office, to send out a very special pile of knitwear.

It's been a bit of a crazy few months while I've been working on this collection. I've had a few shows, looked at a lot of very expensive and not very nice property, been back to the States on a scouting trip against the possibility of moving back next summer, seen family, come back, put on a Yarn Crawl and Marketplace, seen more expensive real estate, starting visiting secondary schools with my daughter, put in an offer on a house, had the offer accepted...you get the idea. And all the while I've been plugging away at this accessory collection, in the fantastic Tundra from the Fibre Co.

As the pieces have only just gone off for their photo shoots, I'm not going to reveal too much, but I will share these details: there are three hats, two pairs of fingerless mitts, two cowls (one of which comes in two sizes) and a long, narrow shawl. All of the pieces have cables and texture - some are all over, some have just one focal cable, some have an all-over cabled pattern. All are worked in bulky weight yarn, so they knit up super fast. They all take between one and three skeins of Tundra, and are super soft and squishy.

Over the next few weeks I'll share more details of each piece and the construction, but I didn't want to go much longer without letting you know that I'm still here, and there is still lots and lots of knitting going on.