A New Wool to Love

The Winter Interweave Knits featured an article on a new yarn company, Quince & Co.  Within an hour 1/2 hour of reading the article I had place my first order.  Easily influenced?  Not me! I placed the order on Thursday afternoon.  It shipped on Friday and I received it on Monday.  Pretty quick service, I'd say. 

The fact that their yarn lines are named after birds might have swayed me.  The fact that the beautiful colors are inspired by nature might have swayed me also.  The cost is very reasonable, especially when you consider that this wool is spun in the U.S. from U.S. sheep.  The Lark skeins (sport weight) that I purchased were $5.95 for a 50 g ball/181 yds.  I'll be talking about this wool in an upcoming podcast.  There are 3 skeins of Snap Pea in my stash now.  Actually, not in my stash because I have already started knitting with it. 

From left:  Carrie's Yellow, Storm, Nasturtium, Glacier, Bird's Egg, and Snap Pea.



And yes, it feels just as soft and squishy as it looks.



The package arrived with the wool wrapped in tissue paper and sealed with a "Q" sticker.  There was a lovely postcard with a personal "Thank you" written on it. 

The Day I Met Tosh Merino

So luscious you could eat it...that is Madelinetosh's Tosh Merino. (Doesn't "Tosh Merino" sound like a name for a cad in a romance novel or a soap opera?) I tried knitting Tea Leaves Cardigan by Melissa LeBarre with ordinary worsted in a color called denim. I had bought this wool on sale to make a knock-about sweater for my husband. It was the only wool in my stash and so I repurposed it for Tea Leaves.

The Master Plan: This would be a trial run with the blue wool. If I liked the sweater, I would buy Tosh Merino to make the Real One. Who was I kidding? Blue isn't even my color! A quarter of the way down the yoke, I put the thing down and looked online for a source for Tosh Merino since my LYS does not carry it. After reading rave reviews about Tosh, I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Tosh's popularity is evidenced by it being out of stock in many venues.

I found a great selection at Eat, Sleep, Knit. All of the original colors (all rather neutral) I had selected were sold out. Then my eye landed on Vermillion, which looked like a dark pink on my monitor. The name of the yarn implied it was red, so I took my chances, and am oh-so-happy I did!

Yes, I know the last sweater I made for myself is red, but can a girl have too many red wool sweaters? Not when one of them is in Tosh Merino. This is the softest merino wool I have ever encountered. I confess that I gasped when I first touched it. Then I beetled over to my skein winder! Are you familiar with Malabrigo worsted? Tosh seems even softer. From a distance it looks like a solid red, but upon close examination, subtle shadings are revealed. The day the package arrived was so warm that I was able to sit on the deck, happily knitting a swatch in the sunshine.
So far, the pattern and the Tosh are a delight. The package arrived on my doorstep in just 3 days with standard shipping. I was impressed! Plus I got a little present in the package AND sample cards of all the other lines that the shop carries.

Full Disclosure: If you go to Eat, Sleep, Knit, by clicking on a link in my blog, and place an order, I will get a $5 credit. I will get yardage in the yarnathon for every landing on the site from here. You can sign up too! (But I would be writing all this with or without a the store credit.) At the rate I am knitting with Tosh Merino, every itty bit helps. After going for quite a while without buying wool, I seem to be on a reckless path at the moment. I am totally wild about my fingering weight wool from The Woolen Rabbit and now Tosh Merino. Oh dear.

P.S. Can someone else using Blogger tell me why the Preview is no longer working? What I mean is that I do preview the post and it looks fine. Then when it is published, it looks nothing like the preview. I don't get it.

All I'm Going to Say is "Kool"

My latest project, the Aestlight Shawl, came to an abrupt standstill when I ran out of yarn about 4 inches from the end. I knit as fast as I could but it didn't help. ;) That's like driving as fast as you can to a gas station when your tank is low. So I quickly ordered not one, but TWO more skeins of the lovely Dream in Color Smooshy in Shiny Moss from Little Knits. My plan is that I will then have enough wool to knit another shawl when Aestlight is complete. Dye lot should not matter that much with the variation in color inherent in the skein, but we shall see. I might be in for a rude awakening.
In the meanwhile I had ordered a few things from Knit Picks. Carmen Banana is in the works. She is a female sock monkey with several outfits including a poodle skirt. What a fun, though fiddly, knit. I doubt that saucy Carmen will have a boyfriend anytime soon in this household, at least from the needles of this knitter, but who knows? I estimate that she is taking about as much time as a pair of socks, which is fine. The kit was $19.95 and that included quite a lot of wool. In fact, I'm sure you could get two sock monkeys out of one kit.
Among of the items I ordered from Knit Picks were some skeins of Bare, their undyed wool. What a bargain! Fingering Weight, 75% Superwash Merino Wool, 25% nylon, 462 yards for $6.29! (free shipping if order is over $50, which mine always is). It is actually quite lovely in its bare state. Given the "hobby gene" that runs in my family, it is incredible that I have never in my knitting or former spinning life, dyed even one little bit of wool. No, I was not going to GO THERE. It was another world of chemicals, pots, mordants, and a load of paraphernalia that I did not want to deal with. Then some time ago along came dyeing with Kool-Aid, to which I gave a cursory nod. Can you tell what I am leading up to?
First I read through quite a few tutorials online, all of which varied somewhat in approach. Since microwaves and I don't get along real well lately (I've ruined two), I chose the crock pot method. Armed with a dozen or so packets of unsweetened Kool-Aid, my largest crock pot, a few towels, and a skein of Bare, I delved into the world of color. It was easier than I thought it would be and the result wasn't too bad. I found that although I thought I had PLENTY of Kool_aid, the wool sucked it up pretty fast. Less than 10 min after putting the dye in the crock pot, the water was clear. So I mixed up more "dye" and poured it in. That got sucked up quickly too. Note that my first doses of dye were 3 packets of Black Cherry mixed in water for one end of the crock pot and the same in Cherry at the other end. Still there were areas where the strands are light pink. (It was not my intention to try to match the color of the crock pot.)Nonetheless, I will be excited to see how this fruity wool knits up. It is rather pretty, isn't it? It still smells like Kool-Aid but I think that will dissipate.

Has anyone overdyed something like this to tone it down a bit (just in case)? Is there a food related way? Back in the 80's we used tea to stain muslin for sewing projects. I'm wondering if that would work.
Now I'm taking a poll on how you feel about music on a blog site. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I find it a little distracting and on the other hand I've found some music I really like through blogs. So what do you think? Of course, you can always click on the pause button...