My Box of "Crayons"

If you’re just landing here, you’ve got some catching up to do.  Check out the previous two posts to get up to speed!

One of the things that I love about Carla is her love of color.  She puts beautiful colors together onto yarn, and then when knitters purchase her hand painted yarns, they can effortlessly watch the beauty flow past their fingertips as they knit or crochet.  I love that, but am a bit more of a control freak when it comes to how color works in my projects.

I love to plan exactly where each bit of color goes, and place it specifically in my projects.

We’ve decided to marry my love of Fair Isle knitting with the colors that we created in the studio. 

One of our concerns about Welcome home is that it is an artisanal yarn, and is a bit pricier than yarns you can easily find in a big box store.  It is priced at $26 for the undyed skeins and $29 for the dyed skeins putting it right where it should be compared to other yarns that have been created with a similar process.  My concern for the pricing was that I’d want to use MANY colors, and that a simple accessory project would require a significant investment to get the colors I’d want.

Carla and I talked it over, chatted with some friends about our concerns and decided to do things a little bit different for this run of yarn.

We’re pairing a pattern with a kit that has lots of bits of color. . .they’ll be priced competitively, and for now only available in person at the shows we have this spring.  Any extra skeins left over after we’ve kitted things up the way we like will be sold individually, and we think they’re going to go quickly. 

The first kit we’ll have is of a pattern I released several years ago, and have just re-named and will be re-released.

Marquette (formerly I Heart Fair Isle) is a more advanced Fair Isle pattern that keeps a knitter quite chart dependent, as the motifs in the hat don’t have short repeats that can easily be memorized.  This is not a project for social knitting, but the results are incredible.  When I wrote the pattern, I used only a few colors of yarn, but for our kit, we’ll be using seven different colors to give you a full rainbow to top off even the greyest of winter days.  I've even added an extra chart to the kit to help you know where to change colors for the best effect.

Are you looking for a full box of crayons?  This is the pattern for you.  I love the way the natural brown plays against the kettle dyed colors.  For our sample, I knit it in the rainbow order that would have made my thirteen-year-old self extra happy, but there is enough yarn in the kit to put the colors in whatever order makes your heart sing.  I honestly don’t think you can go wrong with color placement here.  Carla’s attention to color values makes this kit a home run.   Plan your colors, or surprise yourself by choosing a color randomly, and you’ll have a hat that makes you look and feel like a color superstar.

There are a few other kits up our sleeve that I’ll share with you later this spring that are a little bit simpler in their knitting and less complex in their color choices, but this one?  This one is my favorite.  I hope you love it as much as we do.

As I mentioned, for now, these kits will be available at Yarn Con, Ann Arbor Fiber Expo, and Carla will take some to the Ply Away Retreat.  We will also have some in person (assuming we can keep them in stock) at the Black Sheep Knitting Guild meeting in early April where we’ll be sharing more about this sheep to skein project.

We didn’t intend for this to be a limited run, but we’re testing the waters with Welcome Home this year.  Our suspicion is that you’re going to love it as much as we do, and we’ll buy Mary’s entire clip of fleece next year.  For now, mark your calendars, and make a plan to come and see us. 

If you haven’t signed up for my email newsletter yet, and you’re thinking you’re going to want a kit, you may want to take a second and do that now.  Any kits we have left over will be listed on etsy, and my newsletter will let you know exactly when that’s going to happen.  If you're a newsletter subscriber, you'll also see a coupon code for a new pattern this spring.  You won't want to miss out.

I'm headed today to Chicago, I look forward to seeing some of you this weekend!

P.S.  Head over to CraftSanity, I was told there'd be a video about Welcome Home that I'll bet you'd like to listen to!