KLC 2011: Cashmere Merino Yum!

There is still time to sign up to the 2011 Knit Love Club. As a little treat for all 2011 members, I’ve decided to include Sokkusu-E (which I renamed Sokkusu-X, for Xtra special), my nice round and lofty 3 ply 70% merino 20% cashmere 10% nylon yarn which is incredibly soft, and just plain yummy, as one of the yarns for next year’s KLC. I figure everyone deserves some TLC (tender loving cashmere) in their lives, n’est-ce pas?

I also met up with Sam from Yummy Yarn Studio, an indie dyer based here in Calgary, on Friday. Funny how small the world becomes when the network you’re plugged into is extensive and strong. Also met Bess from Make1 Yarn Studio which is my favourite yarn stop in Calgary. Love the space and the area, and Bess was so friendly and lovely when I stopped in.

Meanwhile I am snuggling up with some Handmaiden Mini Maiden since it is rather cold outside (-19 centigrade!!) and knitting a last minute Xmas gift for an elderly family friend. It’s 50% wool 50% silk, light fingering weight in a pretty blue with streaks of bronze. It’ll be an Annis shawl, one of my favourite gift knits.

Managed also to order some Papa Chocolat chocolates… am totally excited to try them. Will pick a box up tomorrow to test them out and report back!

I finally posted my secret santa sock swap kit (very very late, but I sent it extra fast post so it should land tomorrow at the latest), and can’t wait for the recipient to get them. I designed the socks just for her, and really want to show you!

Okay, time for bed. It seems my internal clock will not give up on waking me at 3 am MST. I am usually awake for an hour or so, then zonk out till 830. Very annoying. Wish me sleep-through-the-night luck please!

First & Last 2010

It’s been a whirlwind of a few weeks – we had our first Bloodlines shipment go out at the end of November (Bill Compton & Eric Northman colourways) and today the last of the Knit Love Club 2010 sock kit parcels were posted out.

KLC2010 Last Kit

It’s all a bit sad – I’ve had a great time this year with the KLC club – regular swaps, meeting members at Knit Nation, seeing everyone’s socks (and shawls! Jaq you know who you are! 😉 ). Here’s a little retrospective of the year’s socks patterns (minus the last sock, as it’s still under wraps until Christmas).

KLC 2010 Collection

Next year will be really exciting – I’ll have my own line of yarns, which I’ve christened Sokkusu. Here’s the new logo for the belly bands.

Socktopus Sokkusu Yarn

And the Sokkusu mark:

Sokkusu

The plan is to have Sokkusu-L (lightweight), Sokkusu-O (original, the high twist yarn) and Sokkusu-E (extra, as in extra cushy with cashmere).  All sock yarns, but each with their own personality.  More details next year.

And of course, Christmas is fast sneaking up on us. Amanda sent me a lovely little Christmas brooch – felted wool Mistletoe!

A little Christmas spirit

The Christmas love doesn’t stop there! You’ll recall I received a great parcel with handknit socks last week.  Well, I got a little carried away and signed up twice for the swap -once for hand knit socks, and once for a sock kit (ie yarn and pattern).  So number two arrived in the post today.

SoSeSaSwa 2011

Thank you HJ! The yarn is Leith from The Yarn Yarn in the most delectable chartreuse colour. Fudge, chocolate, sock pattern by HJ herself, daisy seeds and very useful post it notes.

Today is Paul’s birthday – one more year to a decade milestone! Happy birthday Paul. Hope you are ready for some serious bowling tonight! We wanna see Turkeys!

Knit Love Club 2011

The membership roster for KLC 2011 is now closed and will reopen again at the end of 2011. Thank you for your interest!

<!– Sign ups for the Knit Love Club 2011 open today (you can sign up at the bottom of the post) and will stay open until the 20 December, or until all the spots have gone (whichever is the sooner).

What you will get in the Knit Love Club:

• 6 parcels of Socktopus special spun sock yarn, approx retail value £15
• 6 patterns to go with each yarn, approx retail value £4
• A bonus skein approx retail value £25
• An accompanying bonus pattern, approx retail value £4
• A souvenir year book containing all the year’s patterns, photos of members’ socks and a little bio on each member (unless you wish to opt out), approx retail value £20
• All of which are exclusive to club members. Exclusivity on the patterns and yarn ends at the close of the club year

THE DETAILS

1) Designs: The designs will be by Alice (that’s me!) and exclusive to the club for the duration of the club year.

2) Yarn: This year we will have a totally new, specially spun, made in the UK sock yarn!  The totally new sock yarn is being spun exclusively for me here in Britain to the specifications of my socky heart. Which means it will be a lovely rounded 3-ply sock yarn (100% superwash organic merino) with a nice tight twist in a heavy fingering weight. The skeins will be approx 120 grams and 390m.

3) Colourways: I will be dying the colourways so I have artistic control over pairings between pattern and colourway.  Am very excited and have been like a mad scientist at the dye pots!  The colourways will range from solid, semi-solid, to variegated. Solid and Semi-solid are pretty straightforward, but the variegation needs a little explaining. There will be 2 kinds of variegated yarns. The first kind is a soft variegation – think Malabrigo, Manos, water based dying where colours softly blend into one another. The second kind where you have a splash of colour spiralling its way up the sock when the right gauge is hit. It’s sort of ‘spiral pooling’ not just pooling which I take to mean splotches of a colour with no discernible patterning. It’s not self striping because it is not round after round of a single colour, followed by round after round of another colour. For want of a better term, I’m going to call it spirooling.

4) Patterns: These will be pdf downloads from the club drop box. At the end of the year, members will receive a yearbook – a bound soft cover book (in technicolour!) of the year’s patterns, as well as member pages (members can opt out if they wish).

5) Bonus: There will be one bonus skein and pattern that may or may not be a KAL sent out with one of the parcels.

6) Schedule: The sock yarn parcels will be sent out during the 4th week of Jan, Mar, May, July, Sept, Nov 2011.

7) Club forum: There will be a club social group on http://www.ravelry.com (I encourage you to join Ravelry if you haven’t yet).  Ravelry is a fantastic and free resource and a fun place to meet like minded people.

8) Knit Love Club blog: The Knit Love Club blog (www.knitloveclub.com) is where I will post updates on the club, such as calls for address changes about a month before posting, and exact posting dates. All relevant links will be on the blog and contact details. Participation on the club forums is optional however the blog is where you should go if you want answers from the horse’s mouth.

9) Cost: The cost for Full Membership for the year is £150, including VAT, postage & packaging within the UK. For EU addresses add £10 for postage. For ROW (that is, the rest of the world outside the EU) add £33.  There is also a Pattern Only option below, which is £50 including postage & packaging with the UK.  The Pattern Only option includes everything but the yarn.

Full Membership

£150 Please select

UK EU (+£10) ROW (+£33)

Pattern Only Option

£50 Please select

UK EU (+£5) ROW (+£8)

–>

Stonehenge, Petrus & Seriously Gorgeous Lace

I‘ve had a full week – but really fun. My cousin A and her son G were visiting from California (Orange County) over G’s Easter holidays. I was a little nervous about finding fun things for a 14 year old to do – I really am out of touch with teenagers, particularly boys! I can at least remember what it was like to be a teenie girl, but boy? And DH was little help – any questions about his childhood are invariably met with ‘er, I don’t remember’. How thrilled was I to find my little cuz and I shared a love for food! yay! So what did we do?

Borough Market, of course, the famous Brindisa chorizo line. Petrus – Gordon Ramsay’s new-old restaurant. It used to be that Marcus Wareing was the head chef of Petrus in the Berkeley Hotel. Well, Chef Ramsay and Chef Wareing went their separate ways, so now the old Petrus is the new Marcus Wareing at the Berkeley, and the new Petrus is in a different location, headed up by chef Sean Burbidge. We had lunch at the new Petrus – newly opened just two weeks ago – and G was delighted to find that the restaurant director was none other than Jean-Phillippe Susilovic from Hell’s Kitchen fame. Needless to say a lot of photos ensued, with Jean-Phillippe handling the attention with aplomb and good grace. Very charming man, handling four giggly women and one goggly teenager with very good humour. We had an absolutely delicious lunch (and fabulous value at £25 for 3 courses!) and were invited to visit the kitchen after lunch. The food scene in London has changed hugely over the last 2 decades – when A lived on the Isle of Wight for a year – so it was nice to be able to pleasantly surprise them with the quality of food available here.

The outer sarsen circle framing the Heel Stone, seen from inside.

We also went to visit Stonehenge, which I did with my mom years ago. Through a friend (thanks Carole!) I found you can visit Stonehenge outside normal hours and actually get up close and personal with the huge stones. Being inside the circle was a different experience to standing far away. I can see why it was a spiritual place – standing within the huge stone circle you can’t help but feel awed. The hugest stones weigh 40 tonnes each. They are over 24 ft tall. You can see how big they are in the photo – see the teeny tiny peeps on the right?

Size Perspective

It blows my mind to think that those stones have stood there for over four thousand years.

Me and the sarsen Trilithon

We got to watch the sun set on Stonehenge, then we drove to Stockbridge and had dinner at the Greyhound pub. Lovely place – really nice food. Turns out DH also went there on his stag lunch.

Lastly I have also been busy with three projects – the next Knit Love Club sock which I’m pretty psyched about. Got the yarn, worked out the pattern already, and have a little errand to run before starting to knit it up. The aim is to have the samples done in 2 weeks time, ready for a photo shoot in Turkey! Plenty of time.

The second is a sock pattern for a magazine. Very excited! It’s being knit up as I type and I’m really pleased with that one too.

The last is another Aurantium Shawl – this time in Knitwitches Seriously Gorgeous Swiss Cashmere & Silk Laceweight. It is from the same blend as the Handmaiden Swiss Cashmere & Silk 4 ply – 65% cashmere, 35% silk – that I knit my previous Aurantium Shawl from, in fact it is from the same mill. Eirwen has a limited supply of this yarn and I believe she is the only one at present who has any of it. Seriously – run and get some because it is TO DIE FOR! It retails for £32, and you get 1000 metres/100grams for that. I used 32 grams to knit the large size of the Aurantium Shawl. She doesn’t have it listed on her site, but give her a buzz. She is lovely, chatty and will dye to order. I’ve got two more of these babies to knit with. So excited!

Scarab Neroli

Seriously Gorgeous Laceweight Cashmere & Silk blocks out beautifully

Eirwen outdid herself – I wanted an insecty colourway and she came up with Scarab – a gorgeous copper and teal combination.

The silk content allows for lovely crisp edges

The laceweight is amazing. I loved the 4 ply, as it had a soft hand from the yummy cashmere, and despite being lightweight was incredible warm; the laceweight has all these properties, it still feels like you are holding heavenly clouds in your hands, but as the yarn is much finer, the silk properties really come through in spades. It has the cashmere halo, but the sheen of the silk dominates to give it a beautiful glow. It also blocks beautifully – much more crisp and starched than the 4ply, while retaining that crazy I-want-to-roll-around-in-it-naked softness. Today it is getting posted off for a photo shoot. Am a bit sad to say goodbye to it so soon after finishing (blocked just last night) but I will see it again soon enough.

Knit Love Club 2010-1: Rumpled

Finally I can reveal the first instalment for this year’s Knit Love Club. It’s been 3 weeks since the posting date, and I believe all the members have now received their parcels so I can finally blog about it!

Voila Rumpled! Designed by yours truly, using Alchemy Juniper yarn in an exclusive colourway “Rumpelstiltskin”.

Way back in May 09, Clara Parkes reviewed Alchemy’s new sock yarn, Juniper.  What Clara doesn’t know about yarn isn’t worth knowing.  She is my guru!  Tricia had tipped me off to this yarn around the same time, and having read about it, I was intrigued.  I love a good sock yarn.  For me, the holy trinity that makes a sock yarn sing is made up of: a talented dyer, creating colourways that make my heart thrill with joy; quality fibre – butter in my hands as I knit and deliciously comfortable to wear; strong construction – plies and twist that take into consideration the work horse nature of the end product.  If you know me, you’ll know one of my favourite sock yarns is Lightweight STR.  It has a tightly twisted 3 ply construction, is 100% merino and Tina Newton is seriously the bees knees of dyers.  When one colour melts into another, the sum of 1+1 is definitely more than 2.  But I digress.

Juniper definitely has this holy trinity.  It’s super soft. In fact, as Clara points out in her review, superfine Merino is a fiber class that averages a diameter of 15 to 17.5 microns – less than the internationally accepted micron count for cashmere at 19 microns.  To put it technically – Juniper is roll-around-in-it-naked soft. Of course the thing about delicious sock yarns is that we like them soft. Merino is one of the most popular fibres for sock yarn.  The fly in the pie of all this hankering for a soft hand is that the softer the fibre, the more vulnerable it is to abrasion, and the quicker it will wear through.

So how do we counteract that?  You can do alot with the knitting up, but there are ways of adding strength to the yarn itself.   One method is in the fibre mix – by adding nylon, or a fibre (eg alpaca, mohair) that will lend strength to the whole.  Another method is in the construction, and this is the exciting bit about Juniper.  Instead of a tight 3 ply, this is a cabled 8 ply yarn. First rule of plies is that more plies = more strength.  Snapping one chopstick is pretty easy, breaking 8 of them held together is decidedly not. But to add even more backbone to the yarn, the 8 plies are not simply twisted together. They are split up into four 2 ply strands, which are then twisted together, creating what is called a cabled yarn.  Lots of strength and stability.  Given the fineness of the merino, having these 8 plies cabled together is a great thing. We keep the loft, the twist, the bounce, and the incredible softness in a structure that will help withstand abrasion

What yarn lacks in structure (or not) can be reinforced through the knitting.  I once took a class with Judith Mackenzie McCuin who pulled out a victorian knee high sock knit with cotton, which in itself has no elasticity. But the sock – knit on very fine needles, at a tight gauge – had elasticity built into the stitch pattern.  So to give the yarn a helping hand, I designed a pattern that has a stocking stitch gauge of 9 stitches (or 11 for smaller size) per inch so that the fine yarn would create a tight stocking stitch sole (loose knitting in hard wearing areas of socks is like the chlamydia of the sock world (get it, loose? haha i kill myself)- silent and ruinous, yet easily fixed – the looser the knit, the sooner the holes will appear).  Elasticity isn’t a problem here – the yarn is nice and bouncy and has a great sproing factor.

As for colour, I have long admired Gina Wilde’s colour palette and she readily agreed to dye up our first club yarn.  Given the cold spell we had here in England, I had an image in my mind of a soot blackened wood cottage with snow muffling the night sounds, and the weak flicker of a meager fire the only source of light and warmth for a poor girl spinning by the hearth.  Funny the things I have stored in my head! The story of Rumpelstiltskin sprang to mind: the girl being peddled by her father to the king on the promise of a lie- that the girl could spin gold from straw.  From this came the theme to this month’s sock pattern.  The stitch pattern looked like sheafs of wheat to me, and with the fineness of the yarn, it worked perfectly (I’d tried this stitch pattern before with a heavier fingering weight sock yarn… the k4togs just didn’t work).  Gina created a colour that was a darker, moodier gold at sunset, when the girl finally guesses Rumpelstiltskin’s name.  I was worried about the sample skein as it was much darker than I would have liked, but the club skeins arrived and they perfectly matched what I had in my head.

The pattern is a Club exclusive for now – it will be released next year.