We recently found out that another company sells a product named “Essential”, so we need to rename our Essential yarn line. We’ve been brainstorming, but honestly, we’re stumped, so we need your help. Post your suggestions below, and if we pick your name, you win a $50 Knit Picks gift certificate. It can’t be a name that any other yarn company currently uses. If you’re feeling generous, we’ve got a super cute new gift card right now with a heart shaped ball of yarn on it, and we’ve got another one in the works for Mother’s Day, but I won’t blame you if you want to keep the whole prize for yourself!
If you haven’t tried Essential yarn before, it’s a 75% Superwash Merino Wool, 25% Nylon fingering weight sock yarn. It comes in 52 colors including kettle dyes, tweeds, twists, solids, heathers, and multi-colored …

I just finished my latest project…

I loved using double-stranded lace yarn on my Tempest cardigan, and there are so many good colors of Shadow that I wanted to try something similar but at a lower price point. I already had a ball of Shimmer in Cumulus in my stash, and I thought it might go nicely with another favorite, Shadow in Basalt Heather. I swatched them together a few different ways to see if my idea would work, washed the swatches, then got down to business.

I knit a basic raglan sweater in the round using two strands of Shadow held together. Every 6th row, I’d triple strand using two strands of Shadow and one of Shimmer. I was working at about 5.5 stitches per inch, so the miles and miles of stockinette went by pretty quickly. I also …

I’ve gotten out of my solid-color-pullover slump, but now I’ve fallen down the cardigan-with-patterned-yoke rabbit hole. I got a copy of Norah Gaughan’s Knitting Nature, and it has a pattern for a sweater coat with a colorwork yoke done in a fractal pattern. Here’s the image from the book:

I’m making a bunch of adjustments, though. I’m just going to make a standard-length cardigan, instead of a full-length coat, and I’m converting the pattern to knitting in the round so that I don’t have to do purled colorwork on the yoke. I’m also substituting yarn, since the original yarn (Reynolds Odyssey) is a little too spendy for me.

The body is Wool of the Andes Kettle Dye in Timber, and then I’m going to do the yoke background in Auburn with the fractal pattern in Oak. One warning: I did …

I ended up getting four skeins of Shimmer in Bayou and two skeins each of Shadow in Snorkel Heather and Spring Green Heather. Here’s my swatch:

I held one strand of Bayou with one strand of Snorkel for the first half, then switched to one strand of Bayou with one strand of Spring Green. Using Bayou throughout softened the other two colors and pulled them together nicely. I got gauge (20 stitches/4″) using size 6 needles, then washed my swatch in cold water with some Kookaburra and blocked it out on a towel to dry overnight. The fabric softened up quite a bit after washing, and the Shadow kind of puffed up a bit and filled in the gaps in the fabric. <

A friend pointed out that this lace shawl looks like a dead animal in one of my previous posts. Ugh! She’s right though, lace looks horribly ugly until it’s blocked (and perhaps my photography skills need improvement :-). My HUGE problem is that I’m pretty sure I won’t have enough yarn. I made the body of the shawl bigger than the pattern said, so I guessed at how much yarn I would need – oops. For some reason, I have this feeling that if I knit really fast, I can sneak in some repeats of the border without actually depleting the ball of yarn. Totally illogical, and yet I find myself knitting faster and faster and checking how much smaller the little ball of yarn is. I’m just going to have to order some more yarn and hope the dye lot is close.
Pattern: Curved …

Yesterday, I dyed some samples of Jacquard Acid dye colors we don’t currently carry. For comparison, here are the colors we do carry. Do you see any colors in the photo above that you’d like us to carry? Please leave a comment with your vote(s) – yes, more than one choice is allowed!
Top row, left to right: navy blue, gun metal, periwinkle, violet, spruce, brilliant kelly green
Bottom row, left to right: scarlet, russet, aztec gold, golden yellow, silver gray

Separately, a customer called in to ask what happens to the tweed nebs in our Bare Essential Tweed when it is dyed. Since I had only used Kool-Aid dye on Essential Tweed before, I dyed a sample in our darkest Jacquard color, jet black (if you love black Essential Tweed, you can get it already dyed here). The nebs might …