The shortest day of the year

It's a dreary grey day in London today, and there isn't going to be much of it. For today is the Winter Solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere experiences the shortest amount of daylight all year (a mere 7 hours and 49 minutes).

To celebrate the depths of winter, and the gradual return of the sun, today is the kick off of a fantastic KAL hosted by The Fibre Company, featuring their glorious Tundra yarn and the patterns from the Nordlándda collection!

All images copyright 2016 Kate O'Sullivan for The Fibre Co.

The KAL is being hosted in the I Heart The Fibre Co. Ravelry group, and will run through the last day of winter, on March 20th. 

As a special deal, you can get three of the Nordlándda collection patterns for the price of two - just use the coupon code Northland17 when you check out to receive your discount. I'll be hanging around the KAL thread on Ravelry to answer any questions and cheer people on, and I'm excited to be joining in!

Copyright 2016 Kate O'Sullivan for The Fibre Co.

I'm going to knit Fauske in some handspun Bluefaced Leicester - the singles are done, but now I've got to ply and finish the yarn before I can cast on. Looking forward to having you all join in! 

What are y'all doing in March?

Me? I'm going to go to Edinburgh to hang out at the wonderful, amazing, fantabulous Edinburgh Yarn Festival.

You can see the full list of exhibitors here and boy is it going to be a great show. I hope to see you there!

Yarnporium is coming!

You may or may not have seen some details over the past few weeks about a little show I'm going to be vending at this coming weekend - the brand new Yarnporium!

The Yarnporium kicks off on Saturday, 5th November at King's College London on the Strand at 10am (unless you've booked a workshop) and will run through 4pm on Sunday afternoon. If you are looking to do any holiday crafting this year, this is the show to go to! There will be yarn and kits and all sorts of lovely, beautiful treats for the crafters in your life (or for yourself, when you get right down to it!) Allison has been doing an amazing job sharing previews of vendor goods on Yarn in the City, but I thought I'd do a bit of my own sharing.

So what am I bringing to the Yarnporium? Well...first up will (obviously) be fibre. Lots and lots of fibre...

Clockwise from top left: Haematoma Humbug BFL, Willow Hearth Romney, Hoard Falkland, Shetland/Suffolk Victoria Sponge batt, Alpaca/Ile de France Victoria Sponge Batt and Quantum Dots BFL.

I'm also hoping to have a few more gradients for the show, including a very last minute one inspired by this gorgeous autumnal vine I saw over the weekend.

I'm also planning on having quite a few spindle kits available - if you've been wanting to learn how to spin, or know someone who wants to learn, these make great Christmas presents! You get a drop spindle, instructions, and four 1 oz/28 g bundles of different fibres to try out for £20. I'll have them with a wide selection of fibre colours and types, so do come by and check them out!
 

Tickets for the Yarnporium are still available at the early bird price (£8 per day/£12 for a weekend ticket) until tomorrow. After that, the prices will go up to £10/£15 respectively, so don't wait! It should be a great weekend and I'm looking forward to seeing you there!

Inishmeane

All photos (c) 2016 The Fibre Co. & Tommy Martin

Early this past summer I got a ping from Carmen at A Yarn Story saying "Have you seen this new Fibre Company yarn Arranmore? It's luscious and glorious and I want a men's sweater design for it!" Before I knew what had hit me we were looking at a Pinterest board and discussing constructions and yarn colours and motifs. We debated henley style versus gansey, raglan versus set in sleeve...the possibilities were endless!

Most importantly, we wanted to come up with a men's sweater that would appeal both to men and the knitters who knit for them. The stereotype is that men want plain, boring, miles-of-stockinette navy or black or brown or dark green pullovers. That's it. But honestly, who among us wants to knit that? I can envision a scenario in which my brain was so fried that I would be good for nothing but plain stockinette in the round, but the prospect is just a bit too blah to be appealing for very long.

So we decide on a mostly stockinette sweater (to cover the standard insistence on "plain") which would highlight the tweedy rustic nature of the yarn, but with some interesting details to keep the knitter of said sweater from going nuts in a sea of blank canvas. A couple of serious cables for example, and a saddle shoulder construction. A tall collar and a henley neckline. A cozy sweater in a glorious Aran yarn that wraps around you like a big hug.

Then there was swatching and knitting (in the ludicrous heat that was Washington DC this past summer when we were there) and a frantic round of button choosing, and some pattern writing. And now, Carmen and I are thrilled to present Inishmeane, named for a small island off the coast of County Donegal.

A dog almost as cute as The Wee Ridiculous Dog that lives in my house

Worked in seven sizes (finished chest measurement from 96.5-157.5 cm/38-62"), Inishmeane is worked in the round from the bottom up, starting with a turned hem. The body is worked in the round to the underarms, and then the front and back are worked flat. Sleeves are worked (also with a turned hem) with a mirrored cable panel on each, and then the cable continues across the shoulder, getting attached to the front and back as you work. Then the collar is worked flat, with the cables continuing on either side, and the front button bands are picked up and worked flat. 

I am super thrilled with how this sweater has come out, but it wouldn't have happened without the support of a lot of people: first off, Carmen, who asked me to come up with something for her, and was an absolute pleasure to work with from start to finish (let me know when the next one needs to come through, ok?), my lovely tech editor Deb for her eagle eyes (!), Daphne and Ian at The Fibre Company for yarn support and being generally all around some of the most lovely people it's been my pleasure to meet in this industry, and Tommy Martin who takes unbelievably phenomenal pictures of knitwear in the Lake District (as evidenced by these photos and the gorgeous shoot he did for Nordlándda last year).

The pattern is available now from Ravelry and from A Yarn Story directly, along with oodles and oodles of gorgeous Arranmore. I'm already contemplating what colour to pick for my, I mean Alex's Inishmeane! And you can read more about the process from Carmen's side of the story on her blog.

Lab Goddess Fibre Club September 2016

Last week saw the shipment of the last instalment of the third quarter of the 2016 Lab Goddess Fibre Club - Oh Be a Fine Girl on Falkland.

Let me talk about the base first: after a couple of months of crunchy wools, I decided September was a good time for something soft and luxurious. It's also my birthday month, so a treat was called for! This superfine Falkland Merino is soft, squishy and breathtakingly easy to spin. This fibre will make fantastic shawls, cowls and hats - good for anything that's going to be next to your skin.

The colourway is inspired by Annie Jump Cannon, an American astronomer and the person who came up with a new classification for star magnitude using visible light. Over her 40 year career in astronomy, she manually classified (i.e. with her bare eyes through a telescope) approximately 350,000 stars, including 300 variable stars, five novas and one pair of binary stars.

By Jan Homann - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6504291

The colourway name and palette come from the spectral classification system that Annie Jump Cannon invented, which is based on the emission spectra of the hydrogen atom, and reflects the effective temperature of the star. The classifications are identified as ), B, A, F, G, K and M, andhave relative colour labels: blue, blue white, white, yellow white, yellow, orange and red, ranging from hottest to coolest. The colourway is a repeating sequence of the spectral classes.

The name comes from the mnemonic that Annie Jump Cannon derived to keep track of the classifications: “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.” 

This is the last month of the current fibre club, but spaces are still available for the fourth quarter, running from October through December - space is limited so don't wait!