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Yarn Road Test: Sylvan Tiger Gradient Shetland

Published by louise

Absolutely AGES ago, the delightful Katie – lover and dyer of British wool and fibre at Sylvan Tiger – gave me a pack of her gradient 4ply Shetland in the Bumblebee colourway. I was so excited by the colours, but also the velvety squish of the yarns.

The Shetland yarn is spun at the Natural Fibre Company – so anyone having knit with this yarn from Blacker before will already know just how lovely their Shetland is! Katie takes four different colours of natural shades and overdyes them with natural dye extracts to create such a lovely gradient effect.


This is how the yarn starts out ©Sylvan Tiger

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and this is how it turns out

| The yarn in the skein

I love squishing a skein of yarn and have it spring back in the hand and each 25g skein is incredibly bouncy and has that velvet feel that I mentioned. But don’t let that firm bounce fool you – the wool has been woollen spun at the Natural Fibre Co, so the resulting yarn is very airy and I felt that it would make a nice light, but insulating fabric.

The colours in the pack range from the acidic, tart bright yellow, a lovely muddy ochre, dried rosemary and a deep khaki brown/green!

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…lost my voice

Published by louise

I have been quiet for the last fortnight, or so.

While I have been working on future podcast episodes and other KB work (and dealing with a rather lengthy and annoying dose of sciatica), I’ve been largely avoiding social media.

I’ve found it really difficult to put into words my feelings about the EU Ref and the current political, and cultural landscapes. I have found the last couple of weeks utterly bewildering and reading my timeline on Twitter (when i do venture there)  I have seen people sharing their experiences of their own bewilderment and frustration, as well as experiences of hate and discrimination. When I read things like this I feel a mish-mash of sorrow, hurt, anger and head-shaking mind-bogglification.

The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer. I feel I have a voice, I just can’t find the words. SO I am not going to go into a big diatribe here or talk about who should have voted for what – I am glad people used their right to vote and I truly hope that the majority were well weighted and considered votes. I don’t even want to sit here and talk about the jumbled feelings I have or how, who, or what is needed to fix it (though someone, please!). I just feel the need to say “Hello, I feel a bit shite about the state of things at the moment.”

Some of my friends have managed to write coherently about how these current times have and are impacting on them. Perhaps I will be able to do the same soon. I hope so. Until then I am going to focus on the only things which are managing to give me a little grounding, if not a distraction at the very least. If you fancy reading on, these are the things which have helped in the past two weeks.

| Woolfest

Despite having a horribly sore back, we manged a couple of hours at Woolfest at the end of June. It was like a woolly womb on the day of the EU Ref result. 

Click on a photo for larger slideshow Read More

KnitBritish Survey – What’s to come

Published by louise

It seems a perfectly sane time in the world to be talking about future plans, promises and introducing a few changes…yes? haha!

One of the things I wanted to do with the survey was to put forward a few of the ideas and suggestions I have received from you over the last wee while and gauge opinion on them. You may remember that my word for 2016 is momentum and it was with that in mind that I set out some of your suggestions. 

 

I have to say that not all of the suggestions are 100% appealing to me, such as video content – cos I am an audio girl at heart!  Another thing I have been asked a lot about is having a KnitBritish Facebook page. I left FB quite some time ago as I really did not enjoy it as a social platform. However I can’t deny that it is something I have been asked about a lot. People have said that they would just like a place on FB where they can like posts from the KnitBritish website and share with their own FB community. (and I am not going to go through everything on the list below)

 

(The Dreaded) Facebook

I was very glad that lots of you shared my feelings about FB, but – ever the two sides of the coin gal – I also felt that certain comments were overlooking how others view the KB community.

| It would be sad for me personally if some the KnitBritish content and community moved over to FB because I would almost certainly engage less as a result.

| Please no separate Facebook page. I’m not on FB, and I hate it when groups become splintered.

Firstly, I would never use FB again as a personal account and therefore would not be “sociable” on it. Any KB FB page would be a place posts from this website would automatically appear (like how they appear on twitter when I publish a post). Secondly, It is easy to think that the KB podcast and community exists in which ever platform you chose to engage in, but I do like to remind people that there are lots of listeners who aren’t on Ravelry, so aren’t in the group there; there are lots of people who tweet and IG about KB who are self confessed lurkers in the group. By that standard there could also be people who only use FB and would like a little KB hitching post there too. So I would suggest that IF i did decide to open a page on FB it could happily co-exist along with the others. The only difference is I would moderate it in virtual silence. This is still a “I don’t know” though, as far as I am concerned. 

Meet Ups and Public Events Read More

KnitBritish Survey Feedback

Published by louise

Thank you so very much to all of you who took part in the KnitBritish survey – I am very appreciative of the time you took to do it and the feedback you gave me.

I wanted to do a survey to gauge what you enjoy about the show and the website and the things you don’t enjoy so much. There seemed to be a few comments in the survey that you thought I might make too many changes based on the results – pah! Do remember that while I do a podcast for the enjoyment of you all, I definitely need to make it work for me and rest assured I am not going to feature or change up things that I don’t want to! Having said that I appreciate that you feel strongly about what you do like and that listening can be a personal thing – so I will do my best to keep on making listening an enjoyable thing!

Let’s have a look at a sample of the feedback. The responses were all anonymous. Read More

#BookofHapsalong – Which hap?

Published by louise
  1. The one thing that most of you know is that you want to knit ALL the haps in Kate Davies’ The Book of Haps. Deciding on which one to cast on first is the tricky thing and then the next question is, which yarn?!

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Hazel Tindall’s beautiful design Hamegaet got me hook line and sinker, as soon as I saw it and it went straight to the top of the queue. In doing so it bypassed Kate’s Moder Dy and Romi Hill’s Happenstance – which had both been placed at the top when they were revealed! But Hamegaet has stayed at the very top and I keep going back to gaze upon it.

© Kate Davies Designs

© Kate Davies Designs

I just love the shape of the wrap and how elegant it looks. The Fair Isle on the shoulders was also a big draw for me.  It will be lovely over a summer dress, but I imagine how lovely it will also look over my winter coat too – very cosy! 

Immediately I went stash diving! I have three skeins of Natural Dye Studio 50% BFL and 50% Wensleydale in a lovely lilac, silvery grey. Because I am using a light yarn I wasn’t sure which colour or yarn to use for the Fair Isle. I don’t have a lot of swatching and testing time either as I want this for a summer do.I wonder about using colours that are going to be a very subtle and have been looking at my Jamieson and Smith Heritage silver grey odds and ends, but it is perhaps too similar to the MC. Fenella  has some great colours, though I fear it will be too light in weight. I shall let you know post swatching, but both yarns are very similar in look and ply to the Natural Dye Studio yarn.

You may remember these beauties.

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I got these special yarns at Edinburgh Yarn Festival this year and I really wanted to put these together into a hap from Kate’s book, but not having seen the book back in March, I put them to one side and waited.  Read More

Hapalong Part II – The Book of Haps

Published by louise

KnitBritishers are no stranger to the hap; as a community we’ve knit over 644 of them in the last 14 months (and these are only those logged in the Ravelry group – I know of many more listeners who haven’t plotted Hap projects on Ravelry…some aren’t even signed up to the site!) 

I know so many of us have been champing at the bit to get our itchy-grabby-knitting hands on Kate Davies’ new book The Book of Haps and after a tantalising daily tease of all thirteen haps, we were all salivating for publication!

© Kate Davies Designs

© Kate Davies Designs

I’ve been thinking since the last hapalong that there should be a little celebration of this book with another KAL. The fact that the hapalong is mentioned in the book means that your own hap projects have been saluted too and that is definitely worth casting on another hap, isn’t it? 
I spoke to Kate this weekend about the possibility of having a KAL (just in case there was going to be an official KDD KAL) and she was delighted that there would be a #bookofhapsalong. Read More

Yarn Road Test: Phileas Yarns Wanderlust BFL

Published by louise

I have been playing with some incredible yarn recently. If you follow me on instagram you may have seen me showing off my swatch of Phileas Yarns Wanderlust BFL recently. I recently had dyer Sylvie over to KBHQ for a chat and you can listen to that interview – where we talk about her dyeing and colour inspirations – by clicking here.|

image: Phileas Yarns

image: Phileas Yarns

| The yarn in the skein 

This yarn is a beautiful, glossy British Bluefaced Leicester BFL. The colour is a semi-solid vivid red and, like all of Sylvie’s colours, is inspired by her travels. You can read about the Saint Expedit colour story on Sylvie’s blog. There is such a depth and richness to the shades of red – ranging from light crimson through to streaks of deep dragon’s blood red!

The colour and lustre are the first thing you notice and then the lovely high twist of the yarn. On picking it up – oh my! This is a smooth and soft yarn (Those of you who like your softer British yarns will be pricking back your ears right about now, I would guess!) and when you do the hand-squish-grab the skein is soft, but has a nice firm bounce-back too. That high twist is going to ensure there is a good bit of stability to what you make.

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| The Swatch

I cast on 36 stitches on 4mm needles. I knit about 36 rows, with different stitches/row lengths. I like to try and knit different textures into my swatches to see what the yarn looks like with different stitches. I knit a garter edging, about an inch of stocking stitch, a lace/mock cable and then some textured daisy stitch.

I noticed the smoothness of the working yarn through my fingers, not as woolly as some BFL yarns I have used, however the high twist doubtlessly helps with the smoothness and it creates a very pretty, round stitch definition. The yarn was also smooth over the needles and the swatch really flew off.

I washed the swatch and pinned it out to the dimensions of 5 x 5 inches and left it to dry.

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| How did it block and wear? 

When dry I unpinned the swatch. What a lovely lot of drape! and I was particularly struck by vividness of that colour and lustre that had not lessened in the washing and blocking process. There is a very slight surface halo bloom, but again I think that high twist makes this a very strong and soft yarn.

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I wore the swatch first against my hip. I wore it whilst at work so there was lots of action involved; walking, lifting, bending… From the moment I put it there I pretty much forgot all about it! There was no prickle, not even a whisper of a tickle. After wearing I had a good look at the swatch – there was no more surface halo and on measuring the swatch it had retained its 5×5″ dimensions. 

To further put the swatch to the test I wore it for another two days. The last day I carried it in my jeans pocket with other items, to see if it changed shape, felted slightly or fluffed up (I am in and out of my pockets a lot!)… and there was no discernible change to the feel of the square, though I would say it has shrunk back ever so slightly – but that could just be from being smooshed up in my pocket!

 

| Which projects will this yarn be suited to? 

This is going to be an all round great yarn for pretty much any garment or accesory and visions of many potential items sprung to mind when knitting with this yarn – in particular socks! That high twist and the durability of the yarn convinces me that this would be a really lovely #nonylon sock yarn. With the incredible lustre and colour vanilla socks and simple stitch patterns will make a very stunning pair of socks. Something simple like Colonel Mustard Socks or Katya Frankel’s Brixham would look incredible in this yarn!

The Wanderer BFL is a really great workhorse yarn and so it will be incredible in garments, as well as your socks, shawls, mitts and hats – I am already thinking it would be great to see this yarn in a Prairie Fire, by TIn Can Knits or even Veera Valimaki’s Morningside, from her new  Bespoke Sweaters collection. 

© Veera Välimäki
© Erin Black
© Tin Can Knits

Overall, Phileas Yarns Wanderlust DK has knit, blocked and worn as I hoped it would – a soft, drapey knitted fabric, but one that has a bit more oomph in terms of strength and sturdiness. (Who says you need nylon for a hard wearing yarn?) – I think you will want to knit all of the colours (all as deeply satisfying as this one!), in all of the weights – and this comes in 4ply and aran too.

| The Details

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Phileas Yarns Wanderlust DK British BFL

100g / 225m

£14.00

Visit the Phileas Yarns Etsy shop for more wonderful colourways and yarn bases. Sylvie shall also be at the Indie Burgh Yarn Crawl Pop Up Market, at The Safari Lounge from 12.30pm on Saturday 11th June. Thanks to Sylvie for letting me play with the yarn and give it a test drive.

 

| Information – All images are copyright to their owners as stated, other images are mine. I was given this yarn to test by Phileas Yarns and offer you a totally honest review. I was not paid for reviewing this yarn.

episode 61 – Inspirations and stories

Published by louise

This week I am hearing all about inspiration and how it can tell amazing stories in colour and design. Karie Westermann is here to talk about the catalysts behind This Thing of Paper and how her love of books and manuscripts is being translated into her new designs for the book. Sylvie, of Phileas Yarns, popped over to talk about how her travel memories are dyed into colourways on sumptuous yarn bases. Get your cuppa and listen via the player below!

You can also listen on iTunes, the podcast app, or search your favourite podcatcher, if you prefer!

| Winner of The Knitting Goddess Give-away

Earlier this month you may remember that Joy McMillan, The Knitting Goddess, gave one lucky listener the chance to win their own bespoke colourway to be dyed on her Wensleydale and Shetland 4ply base. Joy compiled a shortlist  and I can announce that her winner is….JustJoe’s Bluebell Wood! Joy said in her blog post… Read More