sweetgeorgia

Special Blend. MCN.

No doubt, I’m always looking for yarns and fibres to add to my little collection for SweetGeorgia Yarns. It’s always a constant search for beautiful things that I want to touch, admire and knit with. Yarns and colours that I find mesmerizing and inspiring. I know there has been a lot of cashmere-blend fingering weight yarns out there, but I sort of experimented and explored, hummed and hawed. Finally, I found one that I absolutely fell in love with. A yarn that was soft, cosy but still intensely vibrant when dyed. I had the mill especially bump up the cashmere quotient of our yarn, and now I am happy to say that CashLuxe Fine, our 70/20/10 superwash merino, cashmere, and nylon blend fingering weight yarn has been officially added to our mix.

I’ve waited all summer to get the yarn into the studio and now it’s here. Some of our CashLuxe Fine is available at Urban Yarns right now, and many many skeins will be going to The Loopy Ewe in coming weeks. But I managed to save a couple skeins for myself… one skein has been all balled up and waiting to be knit into Anne Hanson’s lovely new(ish) design, Les Abeilles.

Although I’ve been trying to finish unfinished projects and trying hard not to start new projects, after mentioning it to Kimberly on Facebook last Thursday, I couldn’t help myself. I cast on for this shawl on Friday evening and knit all through a 6-hour annual general meeting for DanceSport BC. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you have uninterrupted knitting time. AMAZING.

So far, I’ve concluded that the shawl weighs 77g which makes it about 250 yards of yarn (two-thirds of a skein) and unblocked, the width is only 24″. I’m blocking it right now and have stretched it out to 48″ wide and 20″ deep. Anne’s instructions show that the finished measurements for the “mini” size (which is what I knit), will be about 40″ x 17″. Most likely when I pull out the pins, it will relax slightly to a smaller measurement. I also noticed that she blocked hers with blocking wires. Smart. I’m just using pins to pull out the hem to points. Maybe that’s not her original aesthetic… but, hey, I just have to work with what I have on hand!

The pattern is very easy to complete, even though I fudged the center panel at the very start of my knitting. I blame it on not having stitch markers. Hopefully no one will notice. But the lace pattern is easy to remember and it’s comforting to think that with every row knit, the knitting will just get faster and faster to the end.

The colourway is one of our new ones for fall. Pomegranate. Local knitwear designer, Holli Yeoh, has been knitting this up in one of her new designs and you can read all about it here and … here.

Off to find another colourway to knit Anne’s Pea Vines shaw…

Getting Ready for Fall Knitting

This is the kind of knitting that makes me absolutely, positively blissed out. Simple top-down socks in the most basic pattern ever, knit in plain old stockinette on 2.25 mm circular needles. I’ve been knitting this in one of our new yarns for fall, the BFL Sock. It’s a blend of superwash bluefaced leicester and nylon in a 3-ply sock yarn… pretty much what I consider ideal in sock yarns. Sturdy, wooly, warm, elastic… and takes dye oh so vibrantly.

I do love these Dutch heels too, as a reinforced heel stitch. Right now on the needles, I’m knitting a toe-up sock with a real heel flap… very new for me, since I’ve always knit short-row heels and then been disappointed when they wear through. If these socks are a success, I might permanently switch to toe-up & heel flap sock knitting!

While knitting these, I realized how much I love the fine gauge of this sock fabric… it’s about 8.5 sts per inch (nearly 9). If I had swatched ahead of time, I might have considered adding more stitches to my sock (which I’ll probably do next time). After washing and wearing these socks a few times, I really love how the yarn blooms and fills in. I’ve stashed a few skeins of this at home so that I can knit simple socks all winter.

And speaking of socks, have you seen the new Sockupied? I haven’t downloaded/purchased it yet. I hear knitters are sad it won’t work on the iPad or iPhone. Has anyone read it? What do you think?