This is Augustus.
Augustus does not like sitting prior to being picked up and he does not like to be left alone.
Augustus is my nearly 7 month old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy and he is one of the many, many pets of Team Sundara. I'm already planning an "Augustus" yarn color in the reddish brown of his fur. He's about 14 pounds at the moment and should grow to be about 20 pounds. He is absolutely charming and surprisingly mellow.
A week or two after I got him, I realized I needed his puppyhood captured for posterity, so I had an amazing local dog photographer, Erin Vey, come do a photoshoot. As you can see in these photos, Erin is one of those photographers that can make your somewhat boring daily surroundings look colorful, pretty and sparkly and you can read her blog, or just look at some more photos of Augustus here and here.
Augustus likes chasing small fake insects attached to fishing line as they are swung around in circles, sniffing the private parts of dogs much larger than he and licking the ears of the ones he loves.
Augustus does not like sitting prior to being picked up and he does not like to be left alone.Augustus is my nearly 7 month old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy and he is one of the many, many pets of Team Sundara. I'm already planning an "Augustus" yarn color in the reddish brown of his fur. He's about 14 pounds at the moment and should grow to be about 20 pounds. He is absolutely charming and surprisingly mellow.A week or two after I got him, I realized I needed his puppyhood captured for posterity, so I had an amazing local dog photographer, Erin Vey, come do a photoshoot. As you can see in these photos, Erin is one of those photographers that can make your somewhat boring daily surroundings look colorful, pretty and sparkly and you can read her blog, or just look at some more photos of Augustus here and here.
I'm a fan of supporting great artists, so if you are in the Seattle area and have a pet you'd like photographed, I cannot recommend Erin enough. Her photographs are beautiful and she has quite the gift for capturing the personality of your dog as well as the relationship between the dog and their person. And the quality of the prints and the other fun things you can buy from her are incredible.
Or if you just want to do a girl a favor, go read about how you can vote for her for the Best Pet Photographer of Western Washington and then go vote!
The local post office just finished picking up all these packages for the Seasons mailing. It's our biggest mailing yet and my mom and sister and I had a good laugh over how small some of our first mailings were, and yet, how big they seemed. Back then we couldn't even fathom this many packages.
Aside from blocking, one of the most challenging aspects of the Silk Lace yarn is joining in a new strand of yarn and the subsequent weaving in of ends that ensues. If one's project is under 1000 yards and one does not have cats that enjoy chewing through the working strand of yarn while a knitter is sleeping peacefully, one will only have 2 strands to weave in at the beginning and the end of the project knit with a single skein of Silk Lace yarn. But nobody ever operates under ideal circumstances at all times, so the issue of joining in a new strand continues to vex knitters.
Side note: this most likely vexes crocheters as well, but the attributes of crochet give a crocheter other options for dealing with ends of yarn, so we will focus on knitting.
One could use the "Russian Join" to deal with the ends, but this technique is difficult with a yarn as thin and slippery as the Silk Lace.
There is a fairly easy and relatively painless process for joining in a new yarn and knitting in these ends so weaving in of the ends at the finish of a project is unnecessary. The process is quite intuitive and easy when knitting with the yarn in front of you, but not quite as easy to explain. If these directions prove confusing, please leave a comment and I will do my best to clarify and answer your question.
Let's start with a small swatch in stockinette, where half way through the swatch, a strand of red yarn is joined in to replace the blue yarn that started the swatch.
Instead of immediately discarding the strand of blue yarn, the swatch is knit with both the red and blue strands held together for approximately 10-12 of stitches. The blue yarn is then dropped and the row is finished with only the red yarn. In the photo below, these doubled stitches are demarcated between the "A" and "B".
On the next purl row, the row is started with just the red strand, but at the stitch directly above where the original blue strand was dropped, just above the "B", the blue strand is picked up again and several more stitches are knit with both the red and the blue strands held together. The blue strand is then dropped at the stitch next to "C" and only the red yarn is continued with in the knitting.
On the next knit row, this method is again employed at the stitch next to the "C". The blue strand is picked up and several stitches are knit with the red and blue strand held together. At the point "D" the blue is dropped and the red strand finishes the row.
This is deployed again in the next purl row, as seen in the stitches between the "D" and the "E". At this point, the blue strand is dropped for good and the remaining strand is cut to 8-10 inches to be left until after blocking, at which point, the strand can be cut quite close to the finished garment.
While this process is carried out with the red and blue strand, the exact same method was used for the other end of the red strand and, in the photo above, the doubled stitches can be seen to the right and just below the "F".
Both strands have effectively been "weaved in" by the knitting rather than with a blunt-tipped needle after the garment is finished. This technique can also be used immediately after the cast-on row with the initial strand of yarn. The knitter does not have to deal with these ends after the garment is finished, rather just using a blunt-tipped needle for the final strand of yarn at the end of the project.
In these photos, the swatch was not blocked heavily and the gauge of the knitting was kept quite tight relative to the Slk Lace yarn so the doubled stitches could be readily seen. In actual lace garments, the combination of blocking and the thinness of the Silk Lace render these doubled stitches nearly invisible unless one has excellent eyesight and knows what one is looking for. Additionally, the more Yarn Overs the project has, the more invisible these doubled stitches tend to be.
Next up: Blocking.
Try as I might, I have yet to find yarn as soft as kitty paws.
It's wet and grey and doom and gloom in Seattle today. But it doesn't take much to find bits of color.
Please ignore the slanty-ness of this photo. I've taken about 18 bazillion photos of this yarn today and none of them have been remarkable and I'm losing the light so this is the best, least blurry of the bunch.
Our reskeiners suggested the name "Luscious Lips" recently and I love the name so much I am saving it for the perfect repeatable yarn color. I've found that we give some of these non-repeatable colors such fun and charming names and then I am sad that I have used up said charming name and technically should not use it again. So don't be surprised when I bust out a yarn that we name "red over slightly lighter red" as was recently suggested to me so I can save Luscious Lips for just the right reddish-pink color.
The most common question about the Silk Lace yarn I get asked is "What size needle should I use?" I am sure few find it helpful when I tell them it is a matter of personal preference and suggest swatching until they are happy with the result. But, I realize nobody wants to spend a lot of time swatching YOs and K2togs with a slippery yarn, so hopefully this will help guide your choices.
I swatched the Travelling Vine pattern, found in Barbara Walker's "A Treasury of Knitting Patterns" on page 219, using the Silk Lace in "Royal" on US 0-3 needles. All swatches are 36 stitches across and 4 pattern repeats in length. They were all wet-blocked lightly.
The US 0 needle creates a denser fabric that allows one to see the lace pattern easily. The swatch measures 4" by 4" and if I were knitting a wrap that was more for warmth than for show, this is probably the needle size I would choose.
The swatch on the US 1s measures 5" by 5" and is a bit lighter than the swatch on US 0s. The jump in size from US 0 to US 1 is big, so if you wanted to knit less and have a larger sized garment while still maintaining the integrity of the knitted fabric, US 1s make sense.
The US 2 swatch measures 6" wide and 5.75" long. It obviously is a lot lighter in feel and the knitted stitches show their openness. The lace pattern is still obvious, but it becomes less about knitted fabric versus the YO holes and more about the overall openwork of the lace.
The US 3 swatch measures 6.5" long and 6" wide, so virtually no difference in width from the US 2 swatch, yet the fabric is much more gossamer.
Looking at them next to each other makes the size difference easily obvious, not just of the knitted stitches, but in the YOs. One important thing to consider when choosing a needle size, but also when actually choosing a color of yarn, is the difference in density of the fabric and how that changes the appearance of the color of the lace in the finished garment. If you are knitting with a brightly or darkly colored yarn, the lace might show up quite easily on US 3s but not as much on US 0s; the brightness will be diffused on a larger needle size while a bright color on a smaller needle size might overwhelm the person who wears the garment.
To get a better visual idea of how the needle size affects the dimmensions, here are the swatches stacked up, from smallest to largest.
And then again, but with the orange lines delineating the edges of each swatch.
Next up: Joining yarn with as little effort as possible.
This week got away from me and the only day I took photographs was on Sunday. These are all from my parents' vegetable garden right before we were chased inside by a huge thunder and lightening storm, so the lighting was that weird, pre-storm darkness. The white flowers are cilantro that are about ready to go to seed and the other two are corn, for those of you who may not have seen corn stalks live and in person.
At Sundara Yarn, we dye up two "types" of yarn, the Limited Edition colors and the Permanent Collection colors. I'll talk about the Permanent Collection colors some other post, but here are some facts about the Limited Edition colors.
(from left to right: Fingering Silky Merino Lemon Lime, Sock Citrus Zinger, Sock Burgundy over Saffron, Sock Black over Espresso, Sock Navy over Turquoise, and Sock Spruce over Sage)
All the Limited Edition colors are one of a kind, which means that they will not ever be available again. But, periodically, they end up looking similar to an earlier yarn. For instance, the "Gilded Green Silk Lace" shown below is somewhat similar to the "Bronzed Forest" permanent collection colorway. And, in person, the "Gilded Green" is very close to the "Bark over Leaf Silk Lace" that is just to the left of it in the photo below.
We can't dye these colors again because we don't keep track of how we dye them. There is a lot of fun in adding bits and chunks of dye to a pot and seeing what color is the result. Measuring the dye removes the element of unknown from the process and I feel that the unknown is what gives these colors their life and vibrancy.
(from left to right: Silk Lace in Black Bean, Black over Forest, Bark over Leaf, Gilded Green, Copper Pipes, Brick over Orange, Rhode Island Red, and Magenta over Bamboo)
That being said, one of my favorite things to do is to reverse engineer a Limited Edition color. I haven't had much time to do this lately, but with Mikaela helping with the dyeing, I hope to take some of my favorite Limited Edition colorways and figure out how to dye them over and over again so they can become Permanent Collection colors.
And finally, a friendly reminder that these colors will vary based on your monitor. I didn't color correct these photos. Rather, I left the colors so you could see how they looked in relation to each other. Accurately showing the color of yarn through a photo and a computer screen will forever taunt me as it is impossible to get it right each and every time. Or even most of the time.
(from left to right: Fingering Silky Merino Lemon Lime, Sock Citrus Zinger, Sock Burgundy over Saffron, Sock Black over Espresso, Sock Navy over Turquoise, and Sock Spruce over Sage)
All the Limited Edition colors are one of a kind, which means that they will not ever be available again. But, periodically, they end up looking similar to an earlier yarn. For instance, the "Gilded Green Silk Lace" shown below is somewhat similar to the "Bronzed Forest" permanent collection colorway. And, in person, the "Gilded Green" is very close to the "Bark over Leaf Silk Lace" that is just to the left of it in the photo below. We can't dye these colors again because we don't keep track of how we dye them. There is a lot of fun in adding bits and chunks of dye to a pot and seeing what color is the result. Measuring the dye removes the element of unknown from the process and I feel that the unknown is what gives these colors their life and vibrancy.
(from left to right: Silk Lace in Black Bean, Black over Forest, Bark over Leaf, Gilded Green, Copper Pipes, Brick over Orange, Rhode Island Red, and Magenta over Bamboo)
That being said, one of my favorite things to do is to reverse engineer a Limited Edition color. I haven't had much time to do this lately, but with Mikaela helping with the dyeing, I hope to take some of my favorite Limited Edition colorways and figure out how to dye them over and over again so they can become Permanent Collection colors.And finally, a friendly reminder that these colors will vary based on your monitor. I didn't color correct these photos. Rather, I left the colors so you could see how they looked in relation to each other. Accurately showing the color of yarn through a photo and a computer screen will forever taunt me as it is impossible to get it right each and every time. Or even most of the time.
