Megan was thinking of a cardigan, something simple, with a crew neck… maybe with snowflakes. The kind of go-to cardigan that could keep her warm and cosy all winter long. She was excited to get it on her needles, and asked me to dye the colours of Frost.
It would have white, of course, and a soft silver grey, and… and… ah yes, that lovely cool blue of winter shadows. I couldn’t wait to get started!
The key was getting the balance right: the amount of white to blue to grey, and the intensity of the colours. Frost can be soft and light, or it can hard and crisp; sparkling bright in the sun, or shadowy and blue. I wanted to make sure that Megan got the Frost that she had in her mind, so I dyed it twice and let her choose.
I loved pulling the yarns out of the dyepot, seeing how the colours came together. But, better than that, Megan loved the colours — she said her yarn was exactly what she was hoping for. And I can tell you that nothing is so nice for a dyer to hear!
One thing I’ve discovered since opening SpaceCadet Creations is that I really love photographing yarn. I really love it. When I get the camera in there, in close, and the light is just right and colours are popping and I can almost feel the texture coming right through the picture, I get so excited. Mmmmm… yarn porn — is there anything better?
And I suspect that paragraph is completely incomprehensible to anyone who is not yarn-crazy… But you understand, don’t you? Yeah, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
But sometimes, it goes wrong. I’ve got my camera there, the light is right, the macro is doing its thing… but the colours just aren’t coming out right. It should be working, but it’s just not. And I can’t tell you how crazy-making it is when that happens — because I’ve put a lot of effort into the colours I put in my yarns, and it’s incredibly frustrating when I just cannot get the camera to capture those colours.
This week, I’ve put a bunch of gorgeous yarns in the shop. I love them! Some are sublimely coloured, some are subtle, and some are quirky, but they’re all beautiful to look at…
But see that one in the middle, down at the bottom? The one with a lot of blue and what looks like maybe black? That was one of those yarns that simply refused to be photographed. Flat out refused. Oh, it looks nice enough in the picture but, in real life, it’s just so much more — deep, vibrant purples, dark greens and browns, amazing blues. It’s so dark and rich and moody… truly stunning. But could I capture that on film? Could I heck! And it was driving me crazy!
So, if you can’t fight it, join it. So, here’s how I’m going to look at it: see that picture there in the middle, and the bottom of the page? That one is there to make all the other pictures look even better. Seriously — look at them. Doesn’t that one picture make the colours in the one above it look so subtle and soft? And doesn’t it just make the pinks in the one to the right look vibrant? See what I mean?
And so that bad picture serves a good purpose now. But what’s even better is what will happen when someone buys that yarn… Because when they pull it out of the box and see its true colours… they’re going to understand just how frustrating that camera can be!
The thing that never fails to take me by surprise me is the way that the colour of a yarn can change as it is knitted up. As beautiful as it looks in the skein, when the colour repeats are all long and stretched out, is nothing compared how to it looks as you start knitting and the stitches join the colours together in unexpected ways. It’s so exciting to watch each row unfold!
So exciting, in fact, that it’s sometimes a bit hard for me to send my yarns off to customers… because I want to knit them up myself and see how they come out. And so the thing that never fails to absolutely delight me is when customers share pictures of their finished objects and I get to see my yarns all knitted up. Let me show you two that I think worked out beautifully.
And she used it to make these fabulous Dancing Diamond Socks by Wendy D. Johnson. I love how knitting subdues the wild variegation of the colours but still allows the yellow to pop. The result is just gorgeous!
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When I lifted my first skein of Plumberry out of the dye pot, I loved it — loved it — but I knew that it was the kind of wild variegation that needed a carefully chosen pattern to really bring out the best in the colours.
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And when Sarah chose to knit Pomatomus by Cookie A. with it, I don’t think she could have picked a better pattern for the yarn or a better yarn for the pattern. These socks are absolutely stunning!
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Thank you so much, Cindy and Sarah, for sharing your beautiful socks with us!
And everyone else, when you finish a project with one of my yarns, please do share it — I just can’t get enough of seeing how those colours turn out!
New yarns in the shop are always exciting. But not nearly as exciting as those yarns are in person — holding them in my hands, they are simply sooo much better than in the pictures. How I wish you could just reach into this blog post and feel the softness, squeeze the smooshiness. They are gorgeous!
But since you can’t, pictures will just have to do! Have a look:
With great beauty comes… great danger? Great sacrifice? We all know that laceweight yarns are beautiful — there’s something inherent in its delicacy, and the luxury of its fibers, and the way it soaks up colour. Laceweight is beautiful.
And dangerous, as I recently found out. But sacrifice? The beauty of laceweight requires sacrifice? Not for you, dear readers, but it does for me. Let’s talk about my arms.
My arms are going to fall off. They ache, they’re sore. And as much as my eyes love laceweight, my arms hate it. At 1300 wonderful, delicate, luxurious yards per 100g, it takes a loooooong time to reskein. I have to sit and turn that skein winder round and round and round and round…
When the dyed skein goes on the swift, it really doesn’t look much different from any other skein. My arms are blissfully ignorant of what’s about to happen.
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But after a few minutes of winding, when my arm is expecting the job to be half done, I look and find there’s only wee bit of yarn on the skein winder…
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And so I keep winding. Round and round and round and round…
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And after what seems like forever, I look up and…
.the swift looks as full as it ever was! HOW can that be?!?
My arms are not happy with me. My arms are burning and fed up and ready to quit. It takes some convincing to get them to keep going.
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But after a long, long time, the skein winder starts to look lovely and full like this…
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And the swift finally starts to look a bit emptier…!
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And then just as my arms get to the point where they are ready to fall right off, we reach the end.
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And then it’s done. And it’s gorgeous. And I hold the finished skein in my hand and look at how all the colours blend together gently and I am in love! Laceweight is worth it, I tell myself.
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Until I lay that skein aside, and pick up the next one and start to arrange it on the swift and my arms realise what’s happening… and they don’t like it. They don’t like it one bit.
It’s raining today — a nice, warm, gentle summer rain, but rain nonetheless. And I know I promised you sunshine for this week, but the reason it’s raining today is because the lovely yellows I dyed over the weekend are still drying and if they are wet, then there is no sunshine to be had and the world must be wet too.
But even if your day is rainy like mine and there’s no yellow to brighten it up, let me offer you instead something as deliciously dark and moody as the clouds above.
First, I was delighted to discover that myhideway included my Red Brick yarn in a treasury called Rosé Wine. It’s so inspiring to see all those beautiful rosy reds together.
So inspiring, in fact, that I went and filled the shop with warm colours from pink to burgundies. Have a look…
If autumn leaves turned pink instead of red, it would be this pink. If they shunned the sophisticated golds and the russets, all the subtle shades of brown, and chose instead to wear a girly hue — something wild and unpredictable — it would be this. An explosion of pink tinged with the warmth of the season, this is the colour that autumn leaves secretly wish for. This skein is over 100g of Stella, a beautiful and distinctive 2-ply fingering weight yarn in 80% Superwash Merino and 20% Nylon.
This is a bottle of burgundy wine, rich and deep and smooth, poured out on the brown of the parched desert earth, there amongst the green cacti, where the merciless sun dries it to dark, dusty stain. A waste of good wine, but worth it just to see the amazing colour.
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And a lovely new colourway, DK Weight Yarn in Superwash Merino, in Sleep Deep, that I simply cannot get my camera to capture accurately. It looks all blue-red in the pictures, but as I hold it here in my hands, it’s swirls of deep red and purple.
Here are the colours of dreams, at the moment when you slip from the dark of the room into unconciousness, surrendering to the safety of bed and the soft of pillow behind your head. These are the colours of a mind freed to wander, a psyche unencumbered, your true nature as you let yourself submerge into the deep deep of sleep. This skein is over 100g of Superwash Merino in Astrid, a beautifully smooshy 4-ply, DK (double knitting) weight yarn. There are two skeins available, sold separately.
And watch the shop for those sunshine yellows too! As soon as they appear, the weather is sure to change for the better.
