Keeping Cool

Ugh, knitting and summer. I don’t know how people do it. Already, I live in the Vancouver where the climate is beautifully cool most days. If the temperature gets above 26 degrees, I start to want to wear a bikini top to work. Totally inappropriate work wear, I know. But once the weather gets warm, I find it hard to knit wool without wanting to go rinse my hands under cold water every ten minutes. So, I have two solutions. One: new yarn. Two: hide in the shade.

Enter this SeaCell-based laceweight yarn. For some time now, people have been asking me if I have non-wool yarns because they are either allergic or just want to avoid animal fibres. And outside of often pricey 100% silk, I haven’t had much opportunity to dye non-wool blends. But I did get my hands on a batch of this lovely laceweight and it’s available exclusively on the website as a limited run, called SeaSilk Lace.

It’s a 60% SeaCell and 40% tussah silk blend in a 2-ply laceweight. SeaCell® is a cellulose-based fibre (like Tencel®) derived from seaweed. I had dyed and tried some SeaCell/silk yarn a while back and even blogged about the differences between SeaCell skeins and 100% silk skeins. Being a cellulose-based fibre, the SeaCell doesn’t take up the dye the same way as the silk, so this resulting yarn is at the same time glossy and shiny but also heathered looking. It’s an odd combination to describe, but it’s like having shiny and tweedy in the same yarn.

Here’s hiding in the shade. For those of you who have visited the studio, you’ll know that two sides of the studio (north and west) are actually floor-to-ceiling double-high windows… which means, being in the studio is basically like being in the outdoors. When it’s dark outside, it’s dark at the studio. When it’s hot outside, the heat is magnified by the windows and it’s invariably roasting inside the studio. So, on non-dye days, I have been hiding out at my mini home office.

It’s a little corner I carved out to surround myself with yarn and knitting books. In the daytime, there’s plenty of natural light but it’s stays cool and I can see out into the garden and courtyard space. The hydrangeas are in full bloom and are so unabashedly rich in colour. Violet and mauve. I keep my spinning wheel nearby as well as my guitar and music things. Kind of a grown-up craft girl’s romper room, I guess.

This is where I’m working today. Emails. Bookkeeping. Writing. And keeping cool.

Little Boxes

I would never in a million years consider myself a crocheter. I have so far always been totally inept at reading crochet instructions. dc tr ch dc ch tr. There are just too many “c”s and my eyesight starts to fail me. Even after a lesson with the queens of crochet, themselves, I still need more experience under my belt before I’ll feel good doing this.

But, I have, as a child, made a number of basic granny squares and feel pretty confident about that. And so, I happened upon Lucy’s instructions for a granny square blanket and broke out my box of scraps. Alexa at Urban Yarns can attest to this… she’s seen my big box of Superwash Worsted and Sport in sooo many colours. I’d been saving them to make colour cards (hello pipe dream) but felt it was finally time to do something with them.

The squares are so far quick to make and super portable. In fact, I made four squares on the morning of a Saturday wedding while waiting for the event to start… and then made a handful more in the hot sun while watching the Vancouver Symphony play at Deer Lake Park yesterday. I’m doing three rounds of crochet so far and then going to do the fourth round of all the squares in a unifying colour… and then sew them all together. Don’t know what it will be in the end… but it’s been mindless fun making these little boxes out of scrap yarn… making them them all look just the same.

Ravelry Search Party… with prizes

It goes without saying that in the past few years Ravelry has changed the face of the knitting world. And now they want to make things even better.

The hardworking folks at Ravelry have been working on creating an improved search function so that we can find patterns more easily based on more detailed criteria. For instance, you are specifically looking for a hexagonal-shaped shawl that employs twisted stitches, entrelac and estonian lace patterns… well, this new search feature will be able to do that for you… with your help. Basically, over 166,000 patterns will need to be reclassified in order to best work with the search feature. So for every pattern you reclassify (that is not your own design), you will be entered for a chance to win one of the 17 amazing prizes that have been donated. Our collection of yarns (above) is one of said prizes.

If you want the full scoop about the Ravelry Search Party, check it out »

Going Dutch

There is a soft spot for Oranje in our household, and it’s become much more acutely pronounced as the World Cup Final draws closer. Starting in January of last year, I knit these socks as a gift for my Holland-loving, stroopwafel-eating, “beautiful game”-watching guy. They were finished just a couple days before the start of the World Cup and I’m proud to say he’s worn the socks while watching nearly every game with the Netherlands. The only time he forgot the socks was during the last game with Uruguay when Holland was down at the beginning (I blame that on the lack of orange socks) but ended up winning 3-2. These days, quiet moments are broken with the exclamation, “Big game on Sunday!”. Maybe you can catch us on Commercial Drive on Sunday… I’ll be with the guy bedecked in orange… right down to the socks.

(and here’s another pair of amazing Dutch orange socks… not mine, but I love them all the same.)

Simple Things

Sometimes, my brain makes up obstacles for itself and I self-impose these barriers on myself. Such is the way with this simple lace shawl, the Swallowtail. The Swallowtail Shawl pattern was sitting in my Ravelry queue for over two years and now that I’ve finished it, I don’t know why it took me so long. Maybe I was waiting for the perfect yarn, or maybe I was thinking it would be difficult… I don’t know. But I’ve done it and it was fun AND easy to knit. I even knit the nupps on the Greyhound bus to and from Whistler.

The Simple Things shawlette here was knit by my mother, intrepid new-ish knitter. She’s always excited to show me her new projects and, seriously, she knits so fast. She’ll leave the studio with yarn one afternoon and three days later, she’ll show up with a new scarf. But she can also be a little timid about new things… like this whole top-down triangular shawl technique. But MH’s Simple Things pattern really makes things quite easy and I think my mom’s got the hang of it now. She’s knit another one in Merino Silk DK in Violet Hill… but I think she took that to London with her.

What I found quite eye-opening was that variegated ‘lace’ wasn’t as horrid as I thought it might be. In fact, I quite like it here in this case where the pattern features mostly stockinette rather than complex lace. I’m also really pleased with how the golden yellow bits are spread out quite evenly and not pooly or blotchy.

Simple things like writing these blog posts or my email newsletter take me forever (okay, like 4 hours). I don’t know why they take me so long, honestly. If someone can answer me that, I’d love to know. It’s not even that I don’t have things to share. It’s just that I think I make everything so massive and unmanageable in my mind that it becomes a mountain. Oh, wait, there’s a saying for that… making a mountain out of a molehill. Ohh, I see… that means Wiki says I have cognitive distortion. In any case, I need to stop saying things like “can’t” or “that’s too hard” and just believe that everything is easy, manageable and doable.