Delicious Dilemma

A surprisingly challenging thing I find about designing handknits is how often I have the urge to backseat drive, where yarn colors are concerned.  Yarnmakers have mad skills that I can only dream about, and the colors they offer or don't offer are as much a part of their art as my designs are part of mine.  But sometimes, try though I might not to, I formulate an opinion of what sort of yarn I want, and then set about trying to find it.

Having the cart and horse in this unnatural order nearly always leads to disappointment.  It turns out that my ability to imagine a yarn in no way impacts the yarn manufacturers' desire to make one.

No, it's far better for me to see the available yarn choices first, and then concoct a design to go with them. 

So imagine my dread when I made this swell handspun yarn, and then was persuaded by a friend to go searching for a companion for it.  I knew exactly what I thought it needed, and despaired of ever actually finding it.  And then this shade card came!

Behold the choices!  Almost any of them would work beautifully!  In fact, there are not one, but three contenders:

Choice "A" is a deep, moody merlot.  Neither purple nor red, it floats in the netherworld in between.  "A" reads Dostoyevsky, listens to Chopin, and nearly always remembers its mother's birthday.

Choice "B" is a pure periwinkle, descended directly from Vinca Minor.  "B" is fashionably late to parties, has far too many friends, and a weakness for pulp fiction.  "B" wears cultured pearls to the dentist.

Choice "C" is the sour apple that makes your jaw ache before you've even tasted it.  "C" cares not a whit for the opinions of others, wakes up appallingly early, and once lost an entire weeks' wages betting on the ponies.  "C" knows which fork to use, but usually goes for the spoon.

Which of these is your favorite, Gentle readers? Which would you take out for coffee?  Which would you introduce to your mother?  Which would you trust with a secret?  Thank you for weighing in!
 

Space Age Polymer

Raise your hand if you're a Natural Fiber snob.  I am.  The absolute worst.  I can't stand manmade fibers, or even blends thereof.  They pill.  They stretch.  They are shiny when they shouldn't be, and dull when they should.  They receive color in bizarre and unnatural ways.  They always look like cheap impersonations of something real.   Even wool that has been treated to become "superwash" is too much meddled-with for me to really love it.  Snob Snob Snob.  There, I said it.

I recently began an experiment in changing my own obtuse mind.

This is Rowan's Brea  pattern (a sleeve, to be exact), designed for their Lima yarn.  Lima is an extremely special and unique yarn, in that it is actually a knitted cord of pure alpaca.  While Alpaca lacks bounce and elasticity as a fiber, when millspun into this uniquely-shaped yarn, it is full of air, and as elastic as anything. 

And every 109 yards of it retail for $12.50.  Which brings the Brea sweater of my dreams to about 180 sheckles.  Now, I may be a fiber snob, but fiscal realities will from time to time intrude. 

Enter a funny little yarn made by Berroco, called Comfort.  Comfort is neither new, nor interesting, at first glance. What it is, though, is cable-spun, which construction is as close to the esoteric formulation of Lima as I have been able to come, at about 1/4 the price. 

Whence comes this affordability?  It's plastic.  That's right.  Probably made of recycled milk bottles, or those thingys that hold together soda cans.  (That's the hopeful view.  The less-hopeful one involves polluted Turkish streams and three-eyed fish, but let's please not go there today).  Comfort is made of 50% super-fine nylon, and 50% super-fine acrylic.  It comes in a staggering array of colors, some of which are almost as complicated as a Shetland wool.  Its sheen is neither unnaturally shiny, nor off-puttingly flat.  And the cabled construction makes a fabric that is, in a word: fluffy.  

But here's the craziest thing ever:  Berroco Comfort has fixed a knitting problem that I have struggled with for years, and I don't know how or why.  For as long as I have been making cables, my last knit stitch before a purl stretches out of shape, or some other how gets too loose.  Every trick in the book has failed to correct this idiosyncracy in my knitting.  I have resigned myself to a lifetime of the left-most stitch in every cable I knit being elongated and loopy. 

For some reason, when I knit with Berroco Comfort, this problem has disappeared.  I cannot explain it, but the cable-knitting albatross I had accepted as a permanent part of my knitting experience has magically flown.

So Gentle Readers, so clever and wise; Riddle Me This:  Why should an evil cheap yarn from the Dark Side magically cure a lifetime of ill knitting ju-ju?  Am I going to have to become a Berroco shill and make everything out of plastic yarn from now on?  Has something happened to me physically that solved the loose-stitch problem without my knowledge?  Like the sitcom where someone gets a bump on the head and goes from blundering fool to super-genius?  I know I should try a few cables in a natural fiber to test that theory.  But I'm afraid of jinxing the Brea sweater.  Since things are suddenly un-broken, I'm loathe to fix them prematurely.

In any case, I am happily reassessing a my history of manmade-fiber loathing.  Perhaps it's time to change my luddite ways and embrace the new?  Or maybe I just got lucky.  Either way, I do love a space-age polymer.
 

Mary Had A Little Lamb

Some of you may remember my dismay this spring when, as I was nearing the finish line for getting my first-ever fleece processed and spun, my husband threw it away.  And by "dismay", I mean abject histrionics.

In an effort to restore my Fleece Peace, I purchased a new one.  This time it's the first shearing from a Coopworth lamb, named Gigi. 

There are about 4 pounds of her, before processing:

This is the shot that shows why I fell in love with Gigi:

So crimpy! So luminous!  And not even washed yet!  I can hardly stand it.  I decided to make string while the sun shines.  I started by washing it lock by lock, same as I did for Caora Dubh.  I'm not sure this is the best way to handle the washing for this fleece though, because while it works really well, it's just so time consuming.  My limited (nonexistent) tools dictate that a worsted preparation (keeping the lock formation) would be best, but maybe this fleece shouldn't be spun worsted-style? 

Kindly weigh in, Gentle Readers?  If you have been down this road before, I bet you won't hesitate to set me straight.

In the meantime, here is one thing I will definitely be doing differently than last time:

This is the bag Gigi will be living in until I have her safely spun up.