Edinburgh Yarn Festival, Skyesong and Fibre Club updates

*Quantum Dots, which will be available at EYF on some super soft Falkland merino*

Well. It seems like the last almost four weeks since Unravel have flown by in a blur of wool and dye and chaos. It seems that way because they have! I've been full on prepping for Edinburgh Yarn Festival, which opens for classes today and for vast and fantastic stash enhancement on Friday. I've sent off five (!) boxes of fluff, have crammed a pile more into my luggage, and will be on a train northward in just a few hours, just in time to set up.

However, a few other things have happened in the last few weeks that I'd like to highlight. First off, slots are now open for Q2 of the 2016 Lab Goddess Fibre Club. The club runs £45 plus actual shipping cost (depending on location), and will include three monthly shipments of an exclusive colourway inspired by a woman scientist, either past or current. Check out the Fibre Club page to see past colourways and to book your space now.

Current fibre club members: parcels will ship out next week, and I hope you like this month's instalment!

Secondly - I have a new pattern out! Skyesong is a lace shawl designed for handspun, and I'm super thrilled that it's been published in the new issue of Knitty. The body of the shawl is worked in a garter lace pattern (knit on every row - woot!) until it is the desired size, and then the edge is finished with a border worked sideways and attached to the live stitches.

One important thing to mention: this is proper lace knitting, with things happening on both the right and wrong side rows. However, the body repeat is only four rows long, so it's not too difficult to get into a rhythm. The edging is more complicated and longer (20 rows), but the stitch count changes on every row, so it's pretty straightforward to figure out where you are in the repeat as you go on.

The pattern includes two sizes - the small version was knit up in fingering-weight yarn spun from some gorgeous wool/flax sliver that I got at Spunky Eclectic a couple of summers ago, in the Lobster colourway. The larger version was worked in my own 60% merino/40% flax top, dyed in the Broadbean colourway.

I'll have plenty of the merino/flax top at EYF this weekend, in both semisolid and variegated colourways, so if you're inspired for a little lacey shawl project, please stop by!

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Getting ready for Unravel

It's that last minute press to finish off bits and pieces of prep before packing up on Thursday and heading to Unravel. There's been a lot of final dyeing and prepping and labelling of fibre around here. Want to see some of what's coming with me this weekend?

I'm also super excited to be able to offer kits for my newest hat design, Ironwork.

*Handspun undyed Shetland, with Crystal Violet, Coomassie Blue and Xylene Cyanole for the contrast colours.*

The pattern is written with handspun in mind, and includes tips on how to spin the yarn. It's also got a handy chart to determine the finished size of your hat based on your preferred gauge with your particular yarn and needles. The gauges included run from 4-7 sts/inch, so the pattern can work with anything from fingering to worsted weight.

*Undyed natural brown Shetland, with Congo Red, Ethidium Bromide and Yellow Fluorescent Protein as the contrast colours*

The kits will include 3 oz of main colour and three 0.5 oz bundles of the contrast colours. I'll have the two sample versions kitted up ready to go, but if you want to swap out some of the colours on the day, that's no problem! Kits will also include a printed version of the pattern, with a download code for the electronic version.

I'll be in the Barley room, next to the Yarn in the City booth (which will have copies of the London Craft Guide and yarn for the projects!), and I do hope you'll come by and say hello! And if you're around on Friday afternoon, please come to my talk on "Dyeing Science" from 4:00 - 5:00, where I'll share a few of the stories behind some of my more science-inspired colourways.

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Unravel KAL, talks and much more!

Happy February everyone! It's hard to believe that we are already into the second month of the year, and the next show is barreling down like a runaway train. In other words, the light at the end of the tunnel is getting bigger, but I'm not sure that's because I'm making progress!

My first stop on the February train journey is Bath, where I'll be teaching "How to Knit a Sexy Sweater" at A Yarn Story this coming Sunday. It's a two part class - the morning session will cover swatching: choosing a needle size, how to swatch properly so that your swatch doesn't lie to you, fibre content considerations, and the always important blocking of your swatch. The afternoon will dig deep into how to get your swatch, gauge and chosen sweater pattern to play nicely together, and will tap in to my deep and abiding love of spreadsheets (apologies in advance). There are still some slots available, so head over to A Yarn Story's website to sign up if you'd like to join us - we'd love to have you!

Next up on the list of February events is the Unravel Festival of Knitting, taking place at Farnham Maltings from 19th - 21st February. There's a lot of stuff swirling around for Unravel this year. Louise Zass-Bangham of Inspiration Knits has a new cowl pattern that she's released (and that I tech edited) for an Unravel KAL called Maltings (on Ravelry)- it's free until the show ends on 21st February, so go grab your copy now! Like many of Louise's patterns, Maltings inlcudes all sorts of tips on how to adjust the pattern to different yarns and different degrees of complexity, so you can truly make it your own!

I'm really looking forward to Unravel for several reasons: Porpoise Fur will be there with a booth, sharing space with Yarn in the City (where Alli and I will have our new book available to purchase, along with yarn for the patterns in the book!), but I'm also tremendously honoured to be giving a talk on Friday afternoon from 4:00 - 5:00 pm. The talk is titled "Dyeing Science: From Inspiration to Colourway", and I'll be talking about the origin of some of Porpoise Fur’s science-inspired colourways, from the laboratory bench to finished dyed fibre. I'm really looking forward to sharing the process I go through from the starting images to fibre or finished yarn. The talks are free, and I'd love to have you all join me! Only please don't bring any rotten tomatoes with you...;-)

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Lab Goddess Fibre Club January 2016

This month, credit for the woman scientist who served as the colourway inspiration goes to a club member, who recommended Inge Lehmann as a potential candidate.

Inge Lehmann was a Danish geophysicist and seismologist who was active throughout much of the 20th century (she lived to the ripe old age of 104!). She is known for being the first person to identify that the Earth has a solid core, in contrast with the theory at the time that the inside of the Earth was completely molten.

Her use of seismic data to identify discontinuities in the Earth's mantle and crust helped to identify differences in the upper surfaces of the Earth, and have impacted seismology every since.

This is not the last geologist who will feature in the Lab Goddess Fibre Club, as I happen to live with a geologist who is full of suggestions of people to include! This month’s colourway comes from my mental image of what a cross section of the Earth might look like – brilliant pale yellow for the ultra hot core, shading through orange and red as we move up to the surface, where the molten outer core finally cools to form the solid mantle. I couldn’t resist adding in a pop of green for the biosphere, the outermost layer of Earth. The name reflects the dramatic shift in the understanding of the Earth's structure that her discovery provoked.

I’ve dyed the colourway this month on a custom blend of Jacob wool. Jacob sheep are typically raised for meat, as their wool tends toward the sturdy end of the spectrum. These sheep are unusual in two ways: both sexes have two to six horns, and in one animal’s fleece you can find multiple colours – black, grey and white. This makes their fleece difficult to sell in the UK, as more effort is needed to separate the colours. The blend I’ve used is an equal ratio of white, grey and black Jacop tops, providing a darker undertone to what would otherwise be a fairly bright colourway. I like to think of the combination of colours and dark base as a touch of reality, as we can’t actually see inside the planet.

I love how the colours took to this base, as the darker wool gives great depth to the colours - expect to see more of this fibre at Unravel coming up next month!

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Design Diaries: The Unravel Hat

On the last episode of the Yarn in the City podcast, I talked about a new design that I'm hoping to have available at Unravel, coming up next month in Farnham. This is an idea that's been building in my head for a while, inspired by some samples of the Vital Dyes series that I've had lying around.

I had eight 0.5 oz samples of the original Vital Dyes colours (Congo Red, Ethidium Bromide, Yellow Fluorescent Protein, Oregon Green, Xylene Cyanole, Coomassie Blue, Crystal Violet and Golgi) on Shetland, and realised that, paired with a neutral, those little bits might make up a perfect kit for a colourwork accessory of some kind...

So over the past few weeks I've spun up the colourful bits, and finished some lovely natural brown Shetland singles that will be the main colour for the first design. It's going to be a fairly simple colourwork hat - some ribbing and a bit of the body in the main colour, then a band of repeating colourwork motifs that switch from one contrasting colour to the next, followed by more main colour for the crown decreases.

The next question was about the stitch motif. I can't say that colourwork has ever been my strong suit, and I approached the idea of designing a colourwork hat with more then a little trepidation. The first step was to find a small-ish motif that could be repeated easily i

This is the first idea I swatched (using up leftover handspun Falkland). It fits the bill of being small and easily repeatable, as well as being a motif that would be easy to swap out colours with, but it was pretty boring to knit. Hence the big X.

This one is definitely better - more complex, more interesting to knit, but still pretty small and easily repeated. But I still wasn't loving it.

In the meantime, I went on a trip to the V&A, and spent a good couple of hours wandering around without any plan with Devil. We stumbled across the ironwork exhibit, and the next thing I knew, my phone had no more room for pictures because I had taken so many shots of potential colourwork patterns.

I decided to go with one of these screens as the inspiration for my colourwork design, and spent a lovely chunk of time playing with Stitch Mastery to generate a chart.

That first version worked pretty well, but its a 19 stitch repeat, which does not make for easy hat sizing. So I tried taking just one side of the motif and repeating it:

That's also pretty good actually. I've got to ply the main colour, and do a bit of swatching for gauge and sizing, but I hope to have this baby cast on this weekend, and will then have to pick which three of these colours are going to go with the brown.

Any suggestions?

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