Tag Archives: malabrigo

close to home

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once upon a time

there was a little town in south america.

legend has it (and was recently retold at stitches east) that it was a very little town

so small, in fact, that only one family lived there,

and this family makes yarn.

soft as butter, gliding across the needles yarn.

so, if i’ve got this right, the patriarch of the family takes a trip.

he travels from the little town that is home

to another small town quite far from their home.

once there, he is moved by the multitude of greys

in the rocky coast,

and the weathered shingles.

(he also later told me himself

how the lobster left a very favorable impression.)

with these travel memories fresh in his mind

he returned home and created a brand new colorway for his family’s beautiful yarns.

(the new color has absolutely nothing to do with the lobster.

i just threw that in there because it’s true and it’s fun.)

fast forward to recently

when antonio and i exchanged a few notes

about him sending me a skein or two of his lovely silky merino yarn.

i asked him to surprise me with the color.

and he certainly did.

for when the fiber arrived in the post, all the way

from him in uruguay to me in massachusetts,

& i reached for the label to see its name

imagine my delight when i

found printed there:

‘cape cod gray’.

the house i grew up in and am living in once again

sits barely 45 minutes from this seaside new england town that inspired the colorway,

and as far as i know, (thank you malabrigo) the yarn and i live happily ever after…

‘home’ taken from 18:22-24 in exodus.

ear to ink to fiber

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i am, admittedly, a process knitter.

i am also a recovering perfectionist, so there it is.

in that vein of things,

here is the beginning to now of the ‘rib and button scarf‘.

it is a far from flaw-free process,

but since i aim to ‘recover’ from my perfectionistic bent,

i think i must accept the process, blemishes and all…

so this (radio city music hall):

inspired these:

which in the early stages of

becoming real looked like this:

(note how very unblocked and quite wrinkled it is

from me carrying it all about

to knit it here and there as i went along)

*

*

*

*

*

and

in the end,

all semi-solid

and buttoned up cozy,

wound up in

Interweave Knits Holiday Gifts 2011

looking like this:

and it sure did

come a long way, baby.

‘carried’ taken from 10:5 in jeremiah.

bottom photo courtesy of interweave knits.

‘rios’ in teal feather courtesy of malabrigo yarn.

the fourth skein

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it seems like once the pattern idea is born,

picking a yarn to knit it in shouldn’t be that hard, right?

i mean i knit a lot,

at least a few minutes of every day if the truth be told,

and after all this time i should know what will work.

shouldn’t i?

but, no.

when the squall of my latest brainstorm had passed,

i assembled the usual suspects and the swatching began.

first up was plymouth yarn company’s

trabajos del peru

this is a semi-solid thick and thin yarn

(semi-solid colors and thick & thinness are two of my favorite things in a yarn)

but the stitches i wanted to use were blurred by the yarn’s strong personality.

malabrigo worsted

(which is actually aran weight, go figure)

was up next.

i bought this solely because the color tugged at me.

the tones in the velvet grape are very rich and deep and …

the stitches were now lost

in the variation of color in this skein.

i actually spent time trying to rework the pattern

determined to make this the perfect project

for just this yarn,

but it wasn’t.

this little ball

of brightly colored cotton would surely work

it isn’t thick and thin.

it’s all one shade (blue sky alpaca’s dyed cotton in ‘cumin’ to be exact).

but alas, the cotton had no elasticity to it leaving the cables flat and the ribbing dull.

down to my last contestant, i cast on turquoise retro by noro.

hopeful and a bit unsure,

much to my surprise it knit along absolutely the way i wanted.

the cables popped,

the ribbing held it’s own,

the smile spread across my face.

there is some color variation in this yarn, but it’s not really different shades.

more like the worn to perfection fade

that your favorite things acquire once they’ve been yours for long enough.

i’m headed back now to the retro and the needles and

the pattern that this combo is working up to be.

knit happy! and be safe this weekend.

‘the fourth’ taken from 1:19 in genesis.

perspective

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'stretching ...

… the line’

so my loosey goosey method of storing yarn has led to this.  and i like it.  the smooth and even  rows of the cloudlike burly spun contrasts so interestingly with the mercurial personality of the aquarella.

today it feels a bit like life:  the organized bits crammed right up against the ducks that refuse to stay all neatly in a row.  praiseworthy actions tucked closer than sardines in a can to the urges that should be resisted.  so like my life.

this is knit in one long flat strip and then sewn up at the edges.  it keeps the stripes from having that changing colors blurp that can happen knitting stripes in the round.  with stitches this big the sewing up is easy.  you just thread your tapestry needle through the end stitch of each row being sure to keep the color changes lined up when you come to them.

today my mind is a deepish well.  so one more ‘like life’ idea.  the stripes here are thin on one end and thick on the other, so depending on your vantage point the look really changes.

funny how the same conversation can be heard

to mean two almost completely opposite things

by two different friends or such.

funny like hmmm …

(not ha-ha).

 

 ‘stretched the line’ is taken from 38:5 of job

proximity

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the subject came up, how do you keep your yarn safe where moths can’t destroy it?

lots of ideas were tosed around in the taunton s’n’b:  plastic bins, wishful thinking, cedar, special plastic bags from walmart.  all well and good, but my grandma keeps my yarn safe

from moths.

sort of.

see grandma had these big metal canisters in her carport.  when she no longer needed them, the canisters came to me.  they sit on the floor and stand about halfway up my thigh with lids on top the size of large pizza pans.  they arrived full of her things which have now found their niches about the house leaving them free for my yarn to lay claim to.

now my friend h has a beautifully elaborate system of sorting and storing her yarn in it’s own special closet.  my yarn is divided a bit more willy-nilly.  there are two large bins stacked on top of each another: one of wool and one of cotton.  nearby are the smaller bins i have picked up at thrift stores and yard sales.  these are mostly divided by weight: one for fingering, one for worsted, and one packed with a virtual rainbow of allhemp6.  there’s also a red one full of what i think i’ll use next and often on top of the lids are the leftover skeins that i’ve yet to take the time to put back inside.

i tell you all this to explain how the burly spun and the aquarella, an unlikely pair, have both wound up in the same pillow.  the 1st  is as orange as orange can be, very bright, and very very thick while the 2nd is all sorts of muted shades (red to orange to brown) and the weight varies inch by inch as it is thickly and thinly spun throughout.  i’m fairly sure i would never have thought to put them together, but as i pried the lid of the ‘wool’ bin open a few days back, i saw that they had rolled together and were sitting there at the edge a little tangled into each other.  and they looked good together.  it struck me right then that the smoothness of one complimented the unevenness of the other both in color and in weight.  who knew?

we’re told, ‘bad friends will destroy you’, so perhaps it is also true that good friends (even unexpected good friends) will build you up.  or at least make things a bit more comfy as you go along.  i am expecting this pillow to be very comfy.