Some Truly Wonderful News

05AugApril 14, 2015 By Stephanie

If you’ve been following SpaceCadet for a while, you’ll know about my friend Mel of Singlehanded Knits. She’s a designer, a podcaster, a good friend, and hands down one of the most upbeat people I’ve ever known. And I want to share something about her with you.

Now, what you may not have known is that Singlehanded Knits is so named because, several years ago, a coconut falling from its tree landed on Mel’s shoulder, causing serious nerve damage, and she lost the use the of her left arm. Though the circumstances sound almost ridiculous, the reality was devastating, and I know from our conversations, just how hard it was for her. I think many people in the same situation (including me) might have been tempted to just let everything stop. But Mel’s reaction was extraordinary and so inspiring — facing her challenges head on, she refused to be beaten. Instead, she adapted and raised her game — she learned to knit with one hand, she began designing, and she started a blog and her podcast, recorded on the beaches near her home on Kauai, which she called Singlehanded Knits. And the whole time, Mel continued to believe she would one day regain the use of her arm, and worked hard with doctors and physical therapists to make it happen.

This past weekend, she launched a brand-new podcast and a (stunning beautiful) blog. It’s called “With Mel”, and it’s her first step in the process of moving her online presence to a new domain. No longer will she be Singlehanded Knits. And the reason? Well, it’s in the photo below. Can you spot it?

Mel is using both of her arms. She’s using BOTH of her arms!

Now, that’s a small thing in the grand scheme of the world, and I know Mel still has a lot of hard work ahead of her to continue her healing. But it’s also huge. It’s HUGE! When I saw Mel move her left arm during her new podcast, I stopped dead in my tracks and squealed out loud. She can use her arm again!

And when there is an event of true joy like this, I think it’s worth celebrating, don’t you? So this whole post is about nothing more than sharing with you a small miracle, an amazing bit of news to bring a bit of light to your Tuesday morning.

Good morning, everyone. I hope you have a wonderful day!

PS — if you want to add your celebrations to mine, do send Mel your good wishes on her new blog. I know it’d mean the world to her. Aaaaaand that shawl she’s holding in the podcast image I showed you above? She’s doing something seriously cool and collaborative with it on the podcast. Go watch and join in!

So Cool! SpaceCadet Yarn Bowls & Mugs!

31JulApril 14, 2015 By Stephanie

When my assistant Amy gave me my first Pawley Studios yarn bowl a few years ago, I fell head over heels. I admit, I’ve always been a sucker for hand-thrown pottery, but Amanda Pawley’s bowls are something really special. Delightfully fat and round, with a hint of those gentle ridges that give evidence to the hand-throwing process, and finished with the most deliciously vibrant glazes, I find Pawley yarn bowls very very hard to resist.

So I was hoping the custom yarn bowls that Amanda and I put together last year as a gift for the SpaceMonsters Club would be popular. And were they ever! Not only were the SpaceMonster members over the moon, but emails came pouring in from other customers asking how they could buy one. Now those SpaceMonster bowls were exclusive to the club, but I am super-excited to announce that Amanda and I have been secretly planning little something for everyone else…

The SpaceCadet Collection from Pawley Studios

SQUEEEE!!!!! How gorgeous are these?!? Amanda has created a wonderful little collection, all featuring our cheeky little SpaceCadet’s front and center. The yarn bowls come in two sizes — regular and the adorable mini — and the mug is satisfyingly chunky and generous, and they are all available in three glazes: deep and dark Starry Night, vibrant Arizona Sunrise, and the delightful Sweet Pea glaze.

And I can’t believe how much I love seeing the SpaceCadet’s goofy face grinning away on them! Click here to get yours.

Available to order from Aug 1 to Aug 18 and Amanda will make each bowl and mug by hand once the order period has closed. (The listing in the shop says “dyed to order” because it’s usually referring to yarn but, y’know, it really means “made to order”).

Delivery of these beautiful hand-made items will be in late September to early October.

The Collection and Colours

The Regular Yarn Bowl is shown is Starry Night and is 6″ wide and 4″ high
The Mini Yarn Bowl is shown in Arizona Sunrise glaze and is 4″ wide and 2″ high (if you’ve seen the SpaceMonster yarn bowl, this is the same size)
The Mug is shown in Sweet Pea glaze and holds 12-14 oz, and is microwave and dishwasher safe.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time and I am just so excited to share these gorgeous yarn bowls and mug with you at last. Don’t forget, we will close the listing on August 18, so if you love these as much as we do, click here to grab yours quick!

Decisions! Which Colourways to Dye?!?

29JulApril 14, 2015 By Stephanie

If you’re a member of the SpaceCadet’s Mini-Skein Club, you know I love it because it gives me a chance to really stretch my wings and experiment with colour. Every month, I get to come up with ten colourways, and I have so much fun with that!

For July’s Mini-Skeins, I did another Start-Anywhere Gradient Mix. This one moves from a fabulous sunny-gold through to a delicate purple, which blends into a deliciously juicy blue (see the touches of purple hidden in the blue?), and finally melts back into that gold, creating vivid streaks of green as it does. I love the vibrancy of this mix — all the brightness of summer there in one sweet little bundle!

(And this best bit about these colourways? You may not know this, but when yellow and purple mix, they form the most sublime khaki colour. I think having that bit of earthy contrast in the mix really helps the brighter colours to pop.)

And to be honest, when the Mini-Skeins are finally all twisted and gathered into bundles, it’s usually the Ombre & Gradient Mix that’s my favourite. But this month… this month, the Multicolour Mix just reached out and grabbed me. All of the colourways in there are pure experimentation — I had no idea how they’d turn out — and the results blew me away!

There’s one that I think would be stunning if I took the colours and broke them out into a Gradient bundle of their own. And three more that are really calling to me to be dyed again, perhaps as Limited Editions. Can you guess which ones I’m thinking of?

Most of all, I can’t wait to get my Mini-Skein bundle caked up and ready to… oh, decisions! Should I knit them, weave them or crochet?!? I want to do all three! What would you do with yours?

A Colourway for Languid Days

22JulApril 14, 2015 By Stephanie

According to last night’s 11pm news, the temperature here in western Pennsylvania is about to get miserable: 92 degrees F (33 C) with humidity that you can cut with a knife. I’m no fan of hot weather and I know it’s not due to last long but, while it’s here, I’ll be taking shelter in the coolest spots I can find.

So, it seemed a perfect time to share with you the latest Yarn Alliance parcel, because the inspiration for this colourway is all about finding refuge from the hottest summer temperatures.

Inspired by a languid summer’s afternoon spent in the shade of a lush tree, its branches draping lazily above and letting the sunlight through only in little pools here and there. No matter how harsh the sun’s ray or how wilting the day, the shelter of that cool, dappled shade is the most refreshing place to be.

Y’know, if I’m honest, this is not a colouway that I feels natural to me — I am not often a yellow kind of girl — but the truth is that I just love this colourway! There is something about that just feels so summery and hot… a little singed around the edges… and yet with that wonderfully cool streak of blues and greens. I just cannot wait to see how this knits up!

And every Yarn Alliance parcel comes with a gift and, this time, it was a perfect match for the colourway. When those long, languid days turn into perfect summer evenings, there is nothing nicer than sitting out in the cooling air with a beer (or, in this case, a cool English cider). Renee from Knerd made us these custom beer cosies with the idea of “cold beer, warm hands, dry knitting”.

And y’know, no matter how hot and miserable the day, I think that just has to be the perfect way to end it. Don’t you agree?

The InterStellar Yarn Alliance will open in September for new subscriptions. Want to be the first to hear when it does? Click here to get on the mailing list and get early-bird notification of the opening dates!

I Had a Brainwave! Using Squares, Woven or Granny

18JulOctober 10, 2023 By Stephanie

Monday really should have been a bad day. I had to take my car in for unexpected repairs (urgh… the combination of those two words is always the worst, right?) and I ended up spending nearly six hours waiting for it to be finished. And then to top it off, I realised that as I left the house, I’d accidentally grabbed the wrong project bag. Yep, it should’ve been a bad day.

But when I unzipped the bag, I realised it contained my Zoom Loom — which I haven’t used in months — and a set of Mini-Skeins in some gorgeous purples and greens. So I started weaving …and suddenly remembered how much I love my Zoom Loom — and just how addictive it is making those sweet little woven squares!

Now, whenever I show people how to use the Zoom Loom, I always get asked, “But what do you make with those squares?” And on Monday, I started out making little flowers for a cool boho bracelet. But, let me tell you, you can weave a awful lot of those squares while waiting for your car to be fixed(!), so I started thinking what else to do with them.

What to Make with Zoom Loom Squares?

And I suddenly realised something… Something that was patently obviously but which felt like a brainwave because it had just never occurred to me before… You could use Zoom Loom squares with any pattern that would normally use granny squares!

Now, Zoom Loom squares are much, much lighter and airier than crocheted squares, so the whole feel of the project would change completely in to something far drapier and — woven in fingering yarn — absolutely perfect for summer. But, in the end, it’s just changing one modular building block for another, so the answer to the question is simple. What do you make with Zoom Loom squares? All the same funky, cool things that you make with granny squares!

The Zoom Loom Taught Me How to Make Granny Squares!

Wellllll… not really. But as soon as I had that brainwave, I went online to get inspiration for granny square projects that I could convert into Zoom Loom projects. I just wanted to fill my head with ideas, so I went straight to my Crochet Inspiration board on Pinterest and started looking through all the granny loveliness.

Now, I’m not much of a crocheter at all… Seriously, I can chain and single-crochet and that is it. But something about those granny squares started calling to me. I suddenly thought, I really want to learn to make those… And, even better, I actually heard myself say something I’ve never said about crochet before: I can do this!

Five minutes later, I was watching this (excellent) video on You-Tube and had started my first-ever granny square. And not long after that, I had this…

I have not knit a single stitch all week. I am totally addicted to weaving on my Zoom Loom and now obsessed with crocheting granny squares. Yep, Monday really should have been a bad day, but it ended up being the beginning of a week of fiber adventuring. How fantastic is that?!?

…Ok, so now that you’re thinking of using Zoom Loom squares as if they were granny squares, what modular pattern would you use for them? Got any suggestions?

Creative Colour: Two Projects that Inspire

10JulOctober 10, 2023 By Stephanie

One of the things that I find so seductive about hand-dyed yarn is way it is just so full of possibilities. Every knitter or crocheter looks at a skein and sees a completely different destiny for it — and no two people are ever going to create the exact same thing. Even if they were to use the same yarn and the same pattern, their gauges will be slightly varied and so the colours will arrange themselves in different ways across the stitches… With hand-dyed yarn, there is always that element of what-if, a kind of energy wrapped up in the colour and fiber and twist. I find that so intriguing!

And so I get crazy excited to discover what SpaceCadet customers make with our yarn. I loooove seeing finished your objects in the SpaceCadet group on Ravelry, or posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (make sure you tag me, ok? @spacecadetyarn or #spacecadetyarn).

You know how I much I love hunting out interesting ways to use SpaceCadet Mini-Skeins, right? (If you don’t, just check out the Mini-Skein Ideas board on Pinterest — some really amazing possibilities there) Well, I’ve just got to share this one with you, because sometimes it’s the littlest thing that makes a project really come to life.

Using Mini-Skeins on Mini-Skeins

Now first, if you don’t know Martina Behm’s Hitchhiker pattern, let me show you:

It’s a simple garter stitch shawl — easy to knit but intriguing because of its diagonal construction and fun sawtoothed edging. So far, so good.

But now check out this little modification that Megan/Arthjarna made to her Hitchhiker — and what a massive impact it has on the finished product!

Megan used SpaceCadet Ombre Mini-Skeins so her Hitchhiker shifts from the intense rust of Headstrong at one end to a gorgeous shades of terracotta at the other. But here’s the thing that I think is pure genius… instead of having the colours blend into each other, Megan went bold and chose a contrasting Mini-Skein in a gorgeous chartreuse to highlight each colour shift.

She actually added a second Mini-Skein element to her Mini-Skein project. How awesome is that?!?

Using the Start-Anywhere Gradient Mix

You remember last month I created Space-Cadet’s Start-Anywhere Gradient Mini-Skein Mix? Here’s how it works:

And I just have to share with you this gorgeous project, knit by my assistant Jade/jadeish. It’s the Quaker Yarn Stretcher Boomerang by Susan Ashcroft and it’s got a very similar diagonal construction, but this time with the added texture of alternating knit and purl ridges.

What I love about about this is how the individual Mini-Skeins work together. Look closely… Do you see the gray flecks in the burnt-orange along the edge? Those are there so that skein can blend back into the gray of the first skein if you wanted to start at another point in the Mini-Skein bundle.

But in this shawl, what it actually does is tie the whole thing together, by picking up the colour of the gray at the other end of the shawl, and making the whole piece come together. Even though the first and the last Mini-Skein aren’t physically joined, there’s still a connection in the colour, and that brings the whole shawl full circle.

See what I mean? So many possibilities in each skein of yarn! So come on and show me — what will you make with yours? I’m dying to see!