Unravel KAL, talks and much more!

Happy February everyone! It's hard to believe that we are already into the second month of the year, and the next show is barreling down like a runaway train. In other words, the light at the end of the tunnel is getting bigger, but I'm not sure that's because I'm making progress!

My first stop on the February train journey is Bath, where I'll be teaching "How to Knit a Sexy Sweater" at A Yarn Story this coming Sunday. It's a two part class - the morning session will cover swatching: choosing a needle size, how to swatch properly so that your swatch doesn't lie to you, fibre content considerations, and the always important blocking of your swatch. The afternoon will dig deep into how to get your swatch, gauge and chosen sweater pattern to play nicely together, and will tap in to my deep and abiding love of spreadsheets (apologies in advance). There are still some slots available, so head over to A Yarn Story's website to sign up if you'd like to join us - we'd love to have you!

Next up on the list of February events is the Unravel Festival of Knitting, taking place at Farnham Maltings from 19th - 21st February. There's a lot of stuff swirling around for Unravel this year. Louise Zass-Bangham of Inspiration Knits has a new cowl pattern that she's released (and that I tech edited) for an Unravel KAL called Maltings (on Ravelry)- it's free until the show ends on 21st February, so go grab your copy now! Like many of Louise's patterns, Maltings inlcudes all sorts of tips on how to adjust the pattern to different yarns and different degrees of complexity, so you can truly make it your own!

I'm really looking forward to Unravel for several reasons: Porpoise Fur will be there with a booth, sharing space with Yarn in the City (where Alli and I will have our new book available to purchase, along with yarn for the patterns in the book!), but I'm also tremendously honoured to be giving a talk on Friday afternoon from 4:00 - 5:00 pm. The talk is titled "Dyeing Science: From Inspiration to Colourway", and I'll be talking about the origin of some of Porpoise Fur’s science-inspired colourways, from the laboratory bench to finished dyed fibre. I'm really looking forward to sharing the process I go through from the starting images to fibre or finished yarn. The talks are free, and I'd love to have you all join me! Only please don't bring any rotten tomatoes with you...;-)

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Lab Goddess Fibre Club January 2016

This month, credit for the woman scientist who served as the colourway inspiration goes to a club member, who recommended Inge Lehmann as a potential candidate.

Inge Lehmann was a Danish geophysicist and seismologist who was active throughout much of the 20th century (she lived to the ripe old age of 104!). She is known for being the first person to identify that the Earth has a solid core, in contrast with the theory at the time that the inside of the Earth was completely molten.

Her use of seismic data to identify discontinuities in the Earth's mantle and crust helped to identify differences in the upper surfaces of the Earth, and have impacted seismology every since.

This is not the last geologist who will feature in the Lab Goddess Fibre Club, as I happen to live with a geologist who is full of suggestions of people to include! This month’s colourway comes from my mental image of what a cross section of the Earth might look like – brilliant pale yellow for the ultra hot core, shading through orange and red as we move up to the surface, where the molten outer core finally cools to form the solid mantle. I couldn’t resist adding in a pop of green for the biosphere, the outermost layer of Earth. The name reflects the dramatic shift in the understanding of the Earth's structure that her discovery provoked.

I’ve dyed the colourway this month on a custom blend of Jacob wool. Jacob sheep are typically raised for meat, as their wool tends toward the sturdy end of the spectrum. These sheep are unusual in two ways: both sexes have two to six horns, and in one animal’s fleece you can find multiple colours – black, grey and white. This makes their fleece difficult to sell in the UK, as more effort is needed to separate the colours. The blend I’ve used is an equal ratio of white, grey and black Jacop tops, providing a darker undertone to what would otherwise be a fairly bright colourway. I like to think of the combination of colours and dark base as a touch of reality, as we can’t actually see inside the planet.

I love how the colours took to this base, as the darker wool gives great depth to the colours - expect to see more of this fibre at Unravel coming up next month!

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Design Diaries: The Unravel Hat

On the last episode of the Yarn in the City podcast, I talked about a new design that I'm hoping to have available at Unravel, coming up next month in Farnham. This is an idea that's been building in my head for a while, inspired by some samples of the Vital Dyes series that I've had lying around.

I had eight 0.5 oz samples of the original Vital Dyes colours (Congo Red, Ethidium Bromide, Yellow Fluorescent Protein, Oregon Green, Xylene Cyanole, Coomassie Blue, Crystal Violet and Golgi) on Shetland, and realised that, paired with a neutral, those little bits might make up a perfect kit for a colourwork accessory of some kind...

So over the past few weeks I've spun up the colourful bits, and finished some lovely natural brown Shetland singles that will be the main colour for the first design. It's going to be a fairly simple colourwork hat - some ribbing and a bit of the body in the main colour, then a band of repeating colourwork motifs that switch from one contrasting colour to the next, followed by more main colour for the crown decreases.

The next question was about the stitch motif. I can't say that colourwork has ever been my strong suit, and I approached the idea of designing a colourwork hat with more then a little trepidation. The first step was to find a small-ish motif that could be repeated easily i

This is the first idea I swatched (using up leftover handspun Falkland). It fits the bill of being small and easily repeatable, as well as being a motif that would be easy to swap out colours with, but it was pretty boring to knit. Hence the big X.

This one is definitely better - more complex, more interesting to knit, but still pretty small and easily repeated. But I still wasn't loving it.

In the meantime, I went on a trip to the V&A, and spent a good couple of hours wandering around without any plan with Devil. We stumbled across the ironwork exhibit, and the next thing I knew, my phone had no more room for pictures because I had taken so many shots of potential colourwork patterns.

I decided to go with one of these screens as the inspiration for my colourwork design, and spent a lovely chunk of time playing with Stitch Mastery to generate a chart.

That first version worked pretty well, but its a 19 stitch repeat, which does not make for easy hat sizing. So I tried taking just one side of the motif and repeating it:

That's also pretty good actually. I've got to ply the main colour, and do a bit of swatching for gauge and sizing, but I hope to have this baby cast on this weekend, and will then have to pick which three of these colours are going to go with the brown.

Any suggestions?

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In which I channel Elsa

Over the past few weeks I've spent some time cleaning up my office/studio/general dumping ground for all things woolly. It's been a very good thing - I've found yarn I thought had gone missing, uncovered a couple of design swatches I'd forgotten about, and exposed a number of WIPs in dire need of five minutes before they are FOs.

I've also found some things that I've sadly decided need to take a trip to the big frog pond in the sky. First up on the hit list is a sweater that I was really, really super excited about when I started it - Automne by Ruth Garcia-Alcantud, the cover sweater for Knit Edge Issue 4 way back in 2013.

This sweater is gorgeous. Knit in a chunky weight yarn, it's nice and long, has a cool cabled waist detail, and a gorgeous wide lace collar. It's even got pockets! I immediately ordered yarn, discovered it wasn't going to work, ordered more yarn, and cast on in February of 2014. I knit most of the body over the half-term holiday that month, and then the sleeves and even managed to get everything blocked and the body sewn up and the collar knit and blocked.

And then I tried it on. And realised three things: 1) my well-intentioned modifications to make sure the armholes were deep enough had resulted in sleeve caps that weren't going to fit in the armscyes; 2) that lovely cable waist detail was about four inches lower then my actual waist; and 3) most critically, a long bulky-weight sweater that ends at the midpoint of my thighs is REALLY NOT a good look for me. In reality, it probably looks ok, but I've spent far too much of my life unhappy with my shape to be happy wearing something that doesn't make me feel fabulous.

So, yesterday I heeded the advice of my extremely talented college classmate and Let It Go. I got out the ball winder and reduced my 90% finished gorgeous sweater into a whopping pile of potential.

That is about 600 grams (or just over 900 yds) of lovely red tweedy Elann Highland Chunky (sadly discontinued), which has now been reskeined, given a bath, and is drying over the kitchen radiator as we speak. I've already got plans for this yarn - another sweater, but more or less the polar opposite of Automne in a design sense. And I'm looking forward to casting on. Maybe it will be done in time for next week's predicted ridiculous winter weather? Here's hoping!

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How I spent my Christmas holidays

Happy, happy New Year to you all! In my prennially late fashion, my inaugural new year post is coming after 2016 has already kicked off for almost a week. And I'm afraid that I haven't yet settled down on my plans for 2016 - unlike many people, I have a very hard time making plans for the future until it actually arrives. In other words, my brain had a very had time even considering 2016 before it was 2016.

This tendency to procrastinate was not helped by my coming down with some true awful bug on Boxing Day, which left me feverish and miserable on the couch for three days, before morphing into a pretty horrible hacking coffee that is hanging on to my lungs for dear life. And just about the only crafty thing I felt like doing in the week between Christmas and New Year's was spinning. So I did....

First up was finishing off my "Mutable Loci" on Cheviot from the Lab Goddess Fibre Club November instalment (places still available for January - March!). I spun this as a true 3-ply, aiming for a plied fingering weight yarn to knit into socks.

I got pretty close to fingering weight on the final skein, but the skein is also pretty obviously overspun/overplied. However, seeing as this is destined to become socks, that is not a bad thing; they'll just wear better.

Next up was a bunch of 0.5 oz chunks of Shetland dyed in the original colours in my Vital Dye series. I spun these up semi-woolen, from the fold, aiming for an approximately fingering weight 2-ply.

*From left to right: Congo Red, Ethidium Bromide, Yellow Fluorescent Protein, Oregon Green, Xylene Cyanole, Coomassie Blue and Crystal Violet*

These are part of my prep for Unravel, happening on the 19th - 21st of February (where I am very excited to be exhibiting AND giving a talk!) (gulp!). I'm planning to offer kits for a handspun, colorwork hat - these colourful miniskeins are going to be paired with a neutral and offered with a new pattern I'm working on. I'm thinking at the moment that I'll have at least 2 colourways on offer: a brown with the red, orange and yellow, and either white or grey with the blues and purples. I have a new blue that might slot in really well with the two colours on the right, so we'll see how that all plays out. In the meantime, swatches are being swatched, and plans are being planned. Stay tuned for more details in a new edition of the Design Diaries starting next week.

The other exciting news I have is that I am going to be at the Waltham Abbey Wool Show in Essex on 17th January! This is a very new development, as they had a last minute cancellation and I've gotten in from their wait list. In any event, that means that the shop update originally planned for Saturday 16th January is going to be delayed by a few days. Stay tuned for the exact timing, or sign up for the newsletter to get notification of the update timing (and other newsy bits) delivered directly to your inbox.

Happy New Year to all, and here's to loads of woolly goodness in 2016!

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