Lets Talk Yarn…
This is an excerpt from Shawls to Play With, a shawl collection that is more than the individual patterns, it’s about bringing more freedom to your knitting.
LETS TALK YARN
You’re at a yarn shop, wandering around looking at an amazing array of colors and fibers. A skein catches your eye, you pick it off the shelf, and fall in love. Madly, madly in love. Repeat.
Before you know it, your basket is full, you’ve checked out, and are on your way home with your haul, including a skein or two of lace weight that you didn’t mean to pick up, but that were too pretty to resist. Those skeins hang around your stash, until you finally do a yarn cleanse and pass them along to a lace knitting friend.
Sound familiar? A substantial portion of my stash is lace weight yarn passed along from friends who realized they would never, ever, knit with it. I’m happy to take beautiful yarn off your hands. But I’d be even happier spreading the lace weight love.
I get it. tiny yarn + tiny needles + big shawl + crazy lace = eep!
However, lace shawls are divine. They’re light, airy, drapey, ethereal, and well worth the headache.
But I concede, sometimes they’re a headache.
One of the most straight forward ways to reduce some of the headache of lace is to scale the project up. Many scale their lace projects up by using sock or fingering weight yarns. This does make the project less intimidating, however, most easily accessible thick yarns (especially sock yarns), are designed for durability instead of for drape. This makes them great for sturdy socks, but not so great for drapey shawls. When you use sock yarns for lace shawls, you’re exchanging the drape of lace yarns for the durability of sock yarns.
There’s nothing wrong with fingering weight yarns for lace shawls. It’s been done many times with great success. However, you will never get an ethereal shawl out of sock yarn.
Sock yarn just isn’t ethereal.
Instead I would suggest holding multiple strands of lace weight yarn together.
By holding multiple strands of lace weight together, you keep the drapey properties of lace yarn, while simultaneously being able to go up needle sizes. Of course not all of the properties of lace weight yarn scale up one hundred percent, but many of them do.
The shawls in this collection are perfect for…
…that special skein you’ve been hoarding
We all have very special skeins of yarn that we have no idea what to do with.
Maybe it comes with special memories.
Maybe it’s too variegated.
Maybe it’s not quite your color but is still breathtaking.
These shawls are for the skein that won’t play second fiddle to an intricate lace pattern.
No complex stitch patterns to steal the show, just an expanse of stockinette and strategically placed increases, so these patterns let the yarn shine.
…combining colors or mixing fibers & textures
Holding multiple strands together lets you easily mix colors. Or fibers.
And because the yarn is the star of these patterns there’s no lacework to obscure.
It means you can concentrate on your colors and textures and fibers.
Mix colors, or textures, or both.
The possibilities and combinations are limitless.
This was an excerpt from Shawls to Play With.
Playing With Construction
This is a small excerpt from Shawls to Play With, the shawl collection I’m working on. There are four shawls in the collection (named Gratia, Xylia, Yuki, and Idril) all of which are designed around elegant simplicity.
PLAYING WITH CONSTRUCTION
The shawls in this collection are all variations on traditionally shaped, knit in the round, shawls. The traditional shawl shapes being, the wedge circle, the concentric circle, the pi circle, and the center out square.
Gratia is a variation on the concentric circle, Xylia on the wedge circle, Yuki on the center out square, and Idril is a variation that falls somewhere between the concentric circle and the wedge circle.
Why are there multiple ways to knit a flat piece of fabric in the round?
Because all circular shawls are simply variations on each other.
They all follow the same ratio of stitches increased to rounds worked, 8 stitches increased on every other round, but each shape has the increases arranged in a slightly different configuration.
For the shawls in this collection, I took those traditional increase placements, and the ratio of stitches increased to rounds worked, and played with them.
This is an excerpt from Shawls to Play With, which, with a bit of luck, will be making it’s first appearance later this week.
Review: Cascade Yarns “Forest Hills”
I picked up a new lace weight yarn at my LYS the other day, started knitting with it, and thought it would be fun to do a quick little review.
The yarn is Cascade Yarns “Forest Hills,” a 51/49 silk/merino, lace weight yarn.
With 785 yards (717.5 meters) to a 100 gram (3.5 oz) ball, the yardage isn’t bad, and you can definitely get a shawl from one ball. My LYS had it for $21 a ball, so it’s not a bad price either.
It’s 51% silk 49% merino, (not sure why they didn’t just do a 50/50 blend) so it’s very soft, and drapey with pretty good stitch definition.
It’s a two ply yarn and despite the silk has a very nice body for a lace weight yarn. Unlike some lace weights it doesn’t feel like you’re holding nothing, which is really nice when you’re knitting with it.
The silk creates a very slight halo, which gives the yarn depth, but it’s not so much of a halo that you loose your stitches, and couldn’t do lace work with it.
I’m using this yarn for a very simple stockinette shawl with some eyelet detailing, knit on a US 5 (3.75mm) needle with the yarn held double, in colorway #9 “Nugget Gold.”
If I were to hold the yarn single I would probably use a US 1 (2.25mm) or a US 2 (2.75mm) needle. The ball band recommends a US 1-3 (2.25mm-3.25mm) needle.
I’ll be interested to see how this yarn holds up over time. I wonder if that silk halo means it’ll end up pilling. I’m not super hard on most of my shawls so I don’t see it being an issue, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re hard on your shawls or are using it for something else.
An Anti Disclaimer:
Cascade did not send me this yarn to review, and they did not ask me for my opinion about it.
It was new at my LYS, I thought it was interesting, I bought a ball, started knitting with it, and thought I’d do a quick review.
