I just finished knitting a sample Guitar Herringbone Hat for my friends at Heritage Spinning. The yarn was Heirloom Cashmino 8ply (that’s right, CashMINO, not CashMERINO). Heirloom yarns are from Australia and I’ve not seen them in Lansing-area shops, but I really like them. One of my favorites is Easy-Care 8ply, a washable springy cabled wool DK, more like old-fashioned wooly yarns than most washable wools.

This Cashmino yarn is a DK weight (the same as my Cushy Colorsport and Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino). It’s spun into a nice little springy tube, very shiny. The fiber content is 10% Cashmere, 55% Ultrafine Merino, 35% Microfibre (doesn’t say which kind). Because of the tube construction and the fiber content, the yarn actually nearly shines. It’s very nice stuff.

Joan and Deb at Heritage both like (and look great wearing) colors I don’t wear. Joan picked the yarns for my Heritage Heirloom sock, which are earthtones (harvest gold, avocado, red and brown).

Deb picked the colors for the hat I just finished. Though Deb and I agree on a few colors including hot yellow-green and teals/turquoises, we diverge from that center point for other favorite colors. For example, I picked berry and black for my Barberpole sock. When she knit my pattern, she knit two pair in Cascade Fixation… both with a variegated purple/turquoise/white background, one with hot yellow-green and one with cobalt blue.

So yesterday and today I found myself knitting a hat in lilac, periwinkle and gold (Deb’s picks)… loving how the yarn felt but not too happy with the colors. I must admit, though, now that it is all together I can see why she thought it would work. All three colors are subtle and muted, and it will look good on someone with very different coloring than my own.

(For the record, I do admit I wear combinations others would not be caught dead near… magenta and hot yellow-green, for an example. I like colors that are bright and hot and contain no gray at all, and prefer cool undertones to warm. In my personal color vocabulary, beige and brown don’t really exist, though I’ll knit a few varieties of neutral for other folks on special occasions. Almost anything in my closet looks good next to anything else in my closet; people comment all the time that I look coordinated, but it’s just that I tend to only buy the same colors so everything I own goes together.)

Some people would not have so much trouble knitting in colors they didn’t wear. I am so affected by color, I found myself racing to finish the hat. I guess that’s not all bad!

I did one day of proving I was a good sport, which surely did not hurt me at all. Interestingly, I have two other hats on the needles… one in charcoal for Brian and another Guitar Hat in brown/black/beige to simulate woodtones. Ack! Where’s my pink/purple sock??? LOL!

Photos: 1) New Guitar Herringbone Hat sample for Heritage Spinning. 2) Two Barberpole socks knit by Deb Harowitz/Scarlet Zebra, my friend who works at Heritage Spinning. 3) Same sock pattern (my design) knit by me. 4) Heritage Heirloom Sock in yarns chosen by Joan at Heritage. It’s so interesting how colors really do identify us in some ways! Interesting… when I look at this entry, you could imagine I chose the hat colors… but the lilac is subtly too pale and muted, the periwinkle I do like but it looks bad on me (too much gray in it I think) yet the giveaway is the gold… I just can’t do gold!

Debra Chinn writes that she’s knitting socks from my new Tip-Toe sockyarn, in the Seaside colorway. She says:

Such pretty colors!! I cast on 68 sts on 2.5m dps and getting 8spi, will knit to 7.5″ and dec to 60 sts and start the heel flap. After heel flap, I switch to 2.25m dps for tighter gauge.

Debra just plain cranks out gorgeous socks, and I’m thrilled she’s knitting with my yarn this time.

I created the Seaside colorway several years ago for a retreat put on by Annie Modesitt. I became too ill to go to that retreat, so sent my yarn along by mail… and the colorway has become my best seller by far. I did have to manipulate the photo a little, it looked blue without turquoise or purple. Now it looks turquoise and purple and you can’t see the blue. Sigh… computers do have their limitations when it comes to color. Debra, the socks are looking lovely. (I notice she, too, knits two socks at a time using DPN’s… there are more of us all the time.)

Kristi writes regarding knitting olympics:

Regarding knitting olympics - go for it even if you don’t finish - I figure silver and bronze medalists aren’t perfect, right? - either way, you leave with something!

I love Kristi for her level head. She is the one who wrote about embracing imperfections not that long ago on her blog. Here she goes again, suggesting that an effort is its own reward, deadline or no deadline. Isn’t she a breath of fresh air?

Teresa and Sue R. (both local knitfriends) wrote with giggles about the yarn-draped car escapade. Teresa and I knew one another when we were still school-aged, though it took us a while to figure that out. We both agree it’s such a relief to be at a place in life where we don’t worry about what other people think. Who would have imagined that being less cool could somehow turn into being more cool, in a way.

I’m certainly softer than I once was… I still worry, I’m still passionate, but I can dress myself in the morning mostly based on my mood and the temperature, rather than worrying about who would see me dressed this or that way. I still do worry some (as when I go to knit guild and can’t say hi to everyone I care about) but I’m much happier and more grounded than I once was. (No, Rob, grounded does not mean inanimate, it just means that while I’m chattering I know who I am.)

OK, back to those who wrote. My cousin, Karen, writes from Texas:

A cold snap before a corporate cocktail party sent me scurrying to my yarn stash, to whip something up to wear with a new violet and black brocade jacket… and voila! A new take on your ColorJoy stole…

Didn’t she do a lovely job? The stole and jacket do really enhance one another. Go, Karen!

By the way, some folks don’t write but I do run into them all over town. I can’t go to any yarn shop or even Altu’s without seeing people I know either from this blog or a class they took from me somewhere. Just in the last five days or so, I ran into Terese (Therese?) at Altu’s, and Priscilla and Yvonne and Lindsey and Nancy S. (and I think someone else but it was Friday, please forgive me) at Rae’s… Irene B. and Teresa and Sheila and a handful more at Threadbear… Elise and Marilyn at Little Red Schoolhouse. And of course, I got to see all my friends who work at these shops as well.

This is a wonderful town for creative folks, you know? We have this wealth of yarn shops (besides the ones mentioned above, we have Yarn for Ewe and Woven Art, and then Yarn Garden just down the road a bit), each with their own personality, each with their own style and size and unique yarns they offer… we have a great knitting guild with lots of members. Lucky us. For a city this size, we’re brimming with abundance in the fiber realm!

By the way, last I saw Nancy S. she had just bound off for the cutest Tempting sweater from Knitty, as a gift. She used the Louisa Harding aran weight yarn with cashmere in it (very washable, incredible yarn) which she got from Rae’s. It was just gorgeous. The sweater was in a sort of charcoal/pewter gray, and that makes it perfect to have bows (ribbon, woven through eyelets at the neckline) of many colors, depending on the wearer’s mood. Very cool!!! Good job, Nancy.

I almost went to bed without posting. Thanks to everyone who wrote re: my funny story about yarn gone awry, wrapped around cars. It is really good to know that others laugh about the same things I think are funny!

Wowie, time flies sometimes. I had a busy Sunday followed by a jam-packed Monday. I taught Knitting at the downtown main library on Sunday. It was much different than my normal knitting classes, I met some folks I just could not have reached through yarn shops, I invited them to knitting guild and handed them papers with six local/almost-local yarn shops listed on them. I wish I’d had six hours, not two, but the library was happy and several of the students said they would come by the guild. Good enough!

After class, I popped by Threadbear for a while, then went to a Working Women Artists planning meeting, THEN picked up my helper for a few hours of yarn winding for dyeing. I thought at first I’d have a band practice after that (Abbott Brothers, our larger band) but that didn’t work out so Brian and I rehearsed in our living room instead.

So Monday was a second whirlwind day… allergist, teen knitting club (had maybe 5-7 knitters, all but 2 new to the program), tried to have lunch with Irene then tried to have lunch with Tony. Worked on my handouts instead, popped by Rae’s yarn shop to see Elise for a short while, then off to teach computers in Haslett. Both classes got to learn about the Internet Monday, it was fun. How could it be anything else? We especially enjoyed surfing to websites of one another (class members who have businesses) and friends.

Then Brian took me to dinner. I knit on a hat for him while at dinner, the one I started last night for him. It’s in extra-bulky 70% alpaca/30% acrylic, in sort of a pewter/charcoal color. Really soft and really beautiful (it matches his hair). I’m trying to work on personal knitting during personal time (as in waiting for dinner at the restaurant). When I got home I switched projects.

I am knitting samples for Heritage Spinning. They bought several of my patterns for the first time, this week. I know from experience that patterns sell when there is a sample and do not sell without one. So now I’m knitting a Guitar Herringbone Hat for Heritage. In yarns they picked. Well, the two people running the shop like warm tones and subtle colors. This means that I’m knitting a hat in colors I could not have picked… but the subtle colors will be good, as I’ll photograph them (perhaps for my pattern sale web page for that pattern).

So I cast on after dinner for the Guitar Hat. I’ve finished the ribbing and the multicolored patterned band, and tomorrow I’ll decrease the top of the hat. Why I’m faster knitting a hat in DK weight yarn at 5.5 st/in than super bulky yarn (the alpaca), I’ll never know. It must be that my hands are more used to smaller yarns.

Bedtime. Tuesday (tomorrow) I was supposed to meet an online knitter friend but I didn’t send the confirmation message I wrote her on Sunday. I can’t meet her if I don’t know when or where. I guess that meeting will have to be rescheduled. Pooh.

Um… is anyone else in turmoil about Knitting Olympics? I really need to not focus on personal knitting for 10 days, but then again I’ll be in Florida for some of that time. Which could be called vacation, right? Personal time?

I’m a mean boss to myself, I don’t allow much personal knitting time. Lunches/dinners with loved ones, yes. Knitting for Lynn? No. I really really want to knit a Sally Melville Not Your Mother’s Suit Coat. This would require a lot of swatching just to see if I could get gauge (it’s a huge 1.75st/inch). You need to combine yarns to make it work. But it seems that this is not the kind of knitting I could do easily on vacation.

I also have the shadow knitting shawl I bought yarn for late last fall. That yarn is thinner, lighter weight, smaller needles… but is it something I could knit without looking at the book all the time? I think it’s pretty clear I could not finish that many stitches in 10 days but I would be pleased to get going even halfway. But if I am not really focused on finishing, maybe I’m not following the guidelines and I should just think vacation knit, not olympic knit.

I can’t decide right now. Stay tuned. For now I think I’m not going to dive in and join. I’m a joiner, I love comaraderie, but this may not work for me.

One day at a time, as they say.

Photo: Guitar Herringbone Hats, in colors I picked out.

We have had extra-warm weather the last week or so in Lansing, temps above freezing a substantial amount, fog and rain. There has been no sighting of the sun in days and days. Everyone seems to agree that warm is good but lack of sun makes it less than ideal.

Well, it turned cold yesterday. When I left the house it was raining, and by the time I got home several hours later, we had wet, sticky snow accumulating rather quickly.

I must admit that there are good things about this sort of snow. Sticky snow doesn’t blow much (they predicted blowing and drifting, but in the wee hours it was still too warm for that). It is absolutely beautiful the way it sticks to the trees and the fences. It reflects a LOT of light, which gives the impression it may be sunny (it is not, there is still a fully-white sky… but it’s brighter outside than it has been in perhaps over a week).

It is also the perfect snow for playing in, if you are a kid. This snow sculpts well, makes snowballs, snow forts, snowmen, snow angels. I expect we will have a neighborhood full of amateur-created sculptures in front yards, in a matter of hours!

Snow also makes everything quieter. In a city neighborhood, this is a wonderful benefit. Last night I had to go out to the car to bring in a package I’d forgotten. The world was mostly asleep, and the snow made the world very still and quiet. I enjoyed that short time of silence.

On the down side, if the sticky snow builds up too much on trees and is too heavy and wet, branches can fall on power lines and cause disruptions in our electricity (or phones, for that matter). This city is very beautiful in summer with all the green trees, but that can be a problem with wet snow or an ice storm.

Here is a photo taken out the window of my office, about two yards/meters from the desk where I sit most of the time I’m at home. (Other people knit in easy chairs or on a couch, I knit at my computer desk while reading blogs… that is, when I knit at home at all.) The house straight ahead is Helen’s house… Helen is a feisty elderly woman who is an amazing gardener. The house at right is my friend April’s house. All three of our houses are painted white, as are the three houses in a row beyond Helen’s home, and about three-quarters of the houses across the street to the left in the photo.

Yet today I’m thankful for the light in the sky, color or no color. It is not exactly the sun, but it is significantly brighter than recent days. I think the clouds are thinner today… I can even occasionally see where the sun is up there, trying valiently to peek through.

On Friday I went to the pharmacy at my HMO’s health center building. I was in a hurry as I always seem to be. As I was waiting at the counter to ask for the prescription that had been called in, the woman next to me asked if “this” was mine?

The “this” was yarn. Sockyarn. Tip-Toe in the Yvonne colorway, to be exact. The sock in progress was in my purse. The ball of yarn? It was locked in the front seat of my car!!! Too funny.

I didn’t know how far the ball was from me when the woman pointed out the yarn. I left my bag on a chair in the pharmacy, thinking I must have just dropped the yarn in the hallway. I left the sock in my bag.

Oh, my! I went out in the hallway and there was a trail of yarn. Well, not a trail exactly, because it was suspended several feet from the floor in places. I followed the yarn through the entryway, out onto the sidewalk, across the driveway, and looked again. The yarn was literally draped over a car in the handicapper parking space closest to the door. Behind that car, the yarn finally fell to the ground, in the open drive between that line of parked cars and the next line of parking spots (where my car was parked). The yarn was suspended in mid-air again, coming out of the locked door of my car.

Now, I did notice that this was a photo-op of the best kind. However, I had left my camera in the purse in the pharmacy. And honestly? I just wanted the spectacle to go away, as quickly as possible. Fortunately, I have at least a small sense of humor in this phase of my life, and I did get a very good chuckle from it. So did the bystanders.

One guy asked about Hansel and Gretel and whether I could find my way home if I followed the yarn. One lady about my age asked how far it had gone. A twenty-something young lady looked at me in disbelief, no twinge of a smile on her face, more like puzzlement… whether at the situation or at my laughing out loud over it, I’ll never know.

The ball of yarn I wound as I rescued my new handpaint, is significantly large considering how thin the yarn is. I’m thinking I walked almost half a football field before I got to the car!

I don’t have a photo of the yarn draped through doors and over cars, but here’s a shot of the yarn and sock. The cake of yarn I made on the ballwinder, and the sock is just slightly bigger than it was when the incident happened. The little, messy hand-wound ball? That would be my yarn-chasing adventure of the day.

I can’t help but chuckle as I write this account. Belly laughs are good for the health, they say. In this case, I can be glad of that!

Wed. and Thurs. I had CityKidz Knit! program. It was a very busy week with at least 5 new knitters on Wednesday. At the end of Thursday I had these two girls and the middle one’s mom, at left. Mom is wearing a belt that her daughter knit for her recently, in blues, turquoises, greens and yellows… colors her mom loves. She’s now knitting fluffy pink yarn donated by a dance friend, for a hat.

The girl at right is doing so well these days! She loves to knit (loves the thought of knitting, recognizes which garments people wear are made of knit fabric) but has had trouble with uneven knitting for a while. However, this piece right here in the photo is looking very very good. No holes, and one small hiccup that I didn’t notice until she showed it to me. She’s coming along very, very well.

There are other CityKidz stories to tell but I need to stay away from the computer today. I’m off to Heritage Spinning for a while, and that’s a bit of a drive (three hours round trip).

By the way, local friends… this weekend is the Mid-Winter Singing Festival at Hannah Center in East Lansing. It’s Friday night and all day Saturday plus a Sat. night concert. Consider enjoying this on the gloomy weekend.

I had folks ask for knit-up samples of my new sockyarn. I didn’t know how I was going to get anything more than a swatch knit up.

So then I popped by Little Red Schoolhouse to see Linda. And she had knit up a pair of baby socks in the Petal Flammegarn colorway. I’d had a short skein left after skeining up the yarn and gave her that small skein. She made wonderful use of it, don’t you think?

Linda used a pattern she wrote herself. There is also a boy’s ribbed version of the sock in the same pattern. You can contact her through her website if you are interested.

The Petal Flammegarn is sold out on my website, but I think Linda has one skein in stock at her shop. (I think she also has the only remaining skein of Blueberry Pie Flammegarn as well.) She doesn’t carry a whole lot of my yarn and most of it is in kits, paired up with patterns I’ve written. However, you are sure to ask… so that’s the answer!

I am VERY appreciative of these socks. It’s the first time anything from this yarn has been knit. Knitting samples takes up a *lot* of my time and this way I can go on to other knitting deadlines. I can not tell you how happy I was to see this adorable pair of sockies, ready to photograph. Thanks so much, Linda!

I also knit up two swatches of other Tip-Toe Sock colorways. One is the Lynndy Flammegarn (turquoise) and the other is Yvonne (a multicolor, not a Flammegarn). The first is just a small swatch, knit in the round on maybe 32 stitches on size 2 needles. The second is the toe of a First-Time Toe-Up sock for my very small foot. It’s 44 stitches on size 0 needles, eight stitches to the inch.

My multicolored yarn has minimal pooling, nothing that distracts the eye from the sock itself. This is something I work very hard to achieve. (I understand that there are big fans of pooling yarn, but that’s not how I dye.) Of course, there are definitely color repeats, but they are short enough and repeated often enough that they don’t distract the eye from any textured pattern, rib, cable, or lace.

Next?
I have three half-pound skeins (two matching) of Cushy ColorSport, and two new skeins of lace yarn, dried and ready to skein up. It seems the more I wind yarn the more I just want to sit and knit… so once I finish those 5 skeins I get to sit down and hopefully finish the Button Hat sample for Threadbear. It’s more than half knit and I’m expecting to deliver the patterns to them tomorrow. I know from experience that knitters appreciate a sample, so I want to deliver the hat the same time as the patterns. We’ll see how it goes.

Hi, friends. Update: I’m out of Blueberry Pie Flammegarn and Petal Flammegarn. Will update website later, I’m on my way to Foster Community Center for a few hours…

My friends… you know that I sing as well as work as a fiberartist. Brian and I (as The Fabulous Heftones) came out with our second CD last October. It is titled “In the Garden,” and contains songs about flowers, gardens, rain, rainbows and the like. (The songs were popular in the USA from 1922 to about 1930.)

The lead song on this CD is the sweet and precious “Tip-Toe through the Tulips,” complete with the introduction most of us have never heard before. Interpreted similar to the way it was performed in 1929. You may know that I do in fact really like Tiny Tim, but he did not perform this song as it was written and we bring back something

So now that I have Tip-Toe Sock yarn (yes, I did name it after being inspired by the song), I wish to offer you blog readers a special. If you buy at least one 100gm skein of any of my yarns, you may purchase one copy of the “In the Garden” CD at a special price. The CD is offered by our friends at Elderly Instruments for $14.95, and we do love supporting them as much as we can. If you want to order just the CD, I encourage you to purchase from them.

But if you are buying yarn during this introductory period of Tip-Toe Sock, you may purchase an “In the Garden” CD (complete with the song about Tip-Toeing), for only $10.

This offer is good through February 14 (Valentine’s day… a perfect reason to buy this very romantic album). As always, thank you for your support of my creative endeavors.

My friends, I present to you, Tip-Toe Sock yarn. It’s fingering/sock weight, 80% washable wool/20% nylon. I’m very happy that I’ve found this lovely stuff and can share it with you (actually, thanks to Rae who helped me find the yarn in the first place).

I’m doubly excited, because for a long time I’ve wanted to do yarns in a dyeing technique called Flammegarn (flame yarn). This is a decades-old method from Scandinavia, where they once tied skeins with reeds and then dyed the skein in either red or blue dye.

You know I can’t be just limited to blue and red, right? I have a wonderful deep blue-purple I call Blueberry pie, and an incredible but hard to describe reddish color that is sort of melon, sort of papaya, persimmon, pale tomato… I am labeling it Ruby Red Grapefruit because it seems almost translucent somehow when light shines on it. I also have a petal pink, lilac and my old favorite, turquoise (which I’ve labeled Lynndy which is the nickname my brother uses for me).

I think flammegarn is a beautiful and versatile method of dyeing. There is a sense of light to the fabric. It shows cables, textures and lace better than a higher-contrast/multicolored colorway might.

I am finding that often I sell out of my mostly-solid colors faster than the multicolors, a real surprise to me until I remember that folks enjoy knitting textures. I am hoping these yarns will appeal to those who have been buying the solids.

I’ll do more flammegarn, I’m sure, but perhaps I will not always repeat the same colors. We’ll see what happens.

Oh, and a thanks to one anonymous blog reader who is a loyal local customer of my Cushy ColorSport yarn (which is a truly wonderful yarn indeed). She was the first one to write me regarding yarns on the yarn preview page I offered mid-day on Tuesday. It’s so gratifying to see someone so enthused about my work! Thanks, anonymous!

Photos: 1) colorful, artful pile of Tip-Toe Sock Flammegarn in four of the five colors now available. 2) Tip-Toe Sock in my most popular colorway, “Seaside.”