Sept. update

Thanks for another great update!  All invoices are now out; I’ll put packages together tomorrow (Sunday) and they’ll be in the mail by Monday morning.  I’ll have the dates of the next several updates posted shortly.

Happy fall, all!  I have lots of DK doubles this time around, as well as 33g Four Quarter minis and Straights (non-gradient dyed Four Quarter).

To claim a gobsmacker, send me an email (gobsmackedyarn@gmail.com) letting me know the name of the cake and the base.  The first person to claim a cake gets it.  Things can be pretty fast and furious at the beginning, but I promise I’ll email you back to let you know whether you got what you wanted.  Once the dust starts to settle a little, I’ll follow up with a PayPal invoice; if you haven’t ordered from me before, please include your mailing address (and phone number, if outside Canada).

Please remember that colours may vary across different devices; if you have any questions or would like a verbal description of colours, just ask.

Four Quarter ($42 gobsmacker; $30 Straight): Left: Pick Up the Sky (sky blue Straight); Top centre: Traditional Mischief; Bottom centre: A Bit of a Grape; Right: Blooming at Midnight (Straight)

 

Four Quarter ($30 Straight; $42 gobsmacker): Top: Platonic (Straight); Bottom: A Cat On Hot Bricks

Four Quarter ($30 Straight; $42 gobsmacker): Top: Ease of Elocution (Straight); Bottom: Getting Lost in the Grapes

Four Quarter ($15 minis, 33g each; $42 gobsmacker): Left: A Little Bit of Sky (mini); Bottom left: A Single Plum (mini); Bottom right: A Fern Frond (mini); Right: Bluebird (mini); Top centre: Come From a Far Country

merino/ silk fingering: Left: Sock It To Me!; Right: Gone Into the Dawn For Dew

merino DK: Left: Mauerbauertraurigkeit; Right: Long-Legged Lurgy

merino DK double (one long gradient over two 100g cakes, $84): Never Nervy

merino DK doubles (one long gradient over two 100g cakes, $84): Top: Some of the Stories You’ve Heard; Bottom: Make a Decision and Move

merino/ silk DK double (one long gradient, over two 100g cakes, $96): Keep On Movin’ (magenta to royal purple dappled with silver & blue to royal blue)

merino/ silk DK doubles (one long gradient, over two 100g cakes; $96): Top: Clear Skies Ahead; Bottom: Full Speed Ahead

silky yak DK double (one long gradient over two 100g cakes, $96): In the Evening, Glory

silky yak DK doubles (one long gradient over two 100g cakes, $96): Top: Sousa Echoes in the Silence; Bottom: Glory & Greenery

BFL/ silk lace: Left: Pinkety, Pinkety, Thumb to Thumb; Right: Watermelon Wonder

minis & Straights

Two new formats of Four Quarter are debuting on-line today: minis and Straights.

Minis (aka gobsmidgeons) ($15) are cute little 33g cakes of Four Quarter that give you about 133 m (144 yd) of gradient to play with. That’s just enough to use as contrast colour in a striped shawl or cowl, or an edging for a shawl.  How about using it as the border stripes for Nim Teasdale’s First, Love?  Or the stripes of Martina Behm’s Endless Rainbow?  Minis would also be an amazing choice for a colourwork hat or sweater yoke.

The Straights ($30) are semi-solid skeins with lively colours that will pair well with your favourite gobsmackers. They are completely one-of-a-kind; I dye them by chucking a skein or two into a dye pot to use up any colour that’s left over in the pots when I’m dyeing gobsmackers, then use them as base colour for gradients later. But some of them are so pretty that I hate to mess with them, so… they’re available for you!  You could use Straights on their own, as a main colour with a mini as a border, or– my favourite so far– paired with a favourite gobsmacker to create stripes that mingle and mix.

For today’s update, I’ve paired Straights and gobsmackers together, as suggestions of fun colour combos.  Those are just ideas– feel free to mix and match and make them your own!

July update

Thanks for another great update, folks!  Your next option to catch some gobsmackers is at indigodragonfly’s Highlands Fibre Fling, just outside Haliburton, Ontario, on 18 August.  Hope to see you there!

This update includes some brand new bases (camel/ silk lace, Cabra giants) and a few real oddballs.  The oddballs are yarn bases that I tested; they’re perfectly lovely yarns, but turned out to be too time-consuming or finicky for my dye process.  So if you’ve been hankering for some alpaca-silk sportweight or the like, better get ’em now!  In honour of the oddballs, the names are inspired by a variety of obscure words, in English and in other languages.  Once you’ve snagged your yarn, try giving the names a quick Google search; you might find something fun.

To claim a gobsmacker, send me an email (gobsmackedyarn@gmail.com) letting me know the name of the cake and the base.  The first person to claim a cake gets it.  Things can be pretty fast and furious at the beginning, but I promise I’ll email you back to let you know whether you got what you wanted.  Once the dust starts to settle a little, I’ll follow up with a PayPal invoice; if you haven’t ordered from me before, please include your mailing address (and phone number, if outside Canada).

Please remember that colours may vary across different devices; if you have any questions or would like a verbal description of colours, just ask.

Four Quarter: Top left: Gezelligheid; Top right: Forelsket; Bottom left: Firgun; Bottom right: Komorebi

Four Quarter: Top left: Iktsuarpok ; Top right: Mangata; Bottom left: Merak; Bottom right: Reaching for a Spruce

Four Quarter: Left: Kilig ; Right: Irusu

merino/ silk fingering (MS-4): Left: Have the Whole Day Off; Right: Give Them a Cake and Let Them Go

merino/ silk fingering (MS-4): Flawed Fruit (Second)

Cabra giant: Yuanfen

Oddball (fingering, 70% alpaca/ 20% silk/ 20% cashmere, 400m/100g) ($44): Exulansis

alpaca/ silk/ linen fingering (ASL): Pond Life

Oddballs (sportweight, 80% alpaca/ 20% silk, 260m/ 100g) ($44): Left: Stow Hooking It!; Right: To Call Arlies

merino DK: Mauerbauertraurigkeit

BFL/ silk lace: Top left: No Vains in the Game; Top right: Ollyoxalls; Bottom centre: I’ve Got My Thumbs Up

BFL/ silk lace double (one long gradient, over two 100g cakes): Stochastic

camel/ silk lace: left: Jouska; right: Chrysalism

 

A tale of two bases

I’m pleased to announce two fabulous new gobsmacked bases:

The first is a beautiful laceweight that’s– are you ready for this?– 50% camel and 50% silk.  With that combination of fibres, it’s hardly a surprise that this is a sleek, slinky lace with a lovely shine that makes me think of copper.

New camel/ silk laceweight.  Look at that shine!

It begins life with a soft camel colour, which gently mutes the dyes to create subtle hues.  Camel/ silk lace is a 2-ply, with 800m (875 yd) per 100g cake; $54 Canadian.

The second newbie is Cabra, a super-soft MCN that really brings out the best of goat (the cashmere kind, that is).

The new Cabra giant, a super-soft MCN.

It’s a 3-ply construction of 80% superwash merino, 10% cashmere, and 10% nylon that soaks up dye to create rich, saturated gradients with a strong dappled/ variegated effect.  Cabra comes in 150g giants and is a replacement for my previous MCN giants (now discontinued).  Cabra is on the heavy side of fingering, with 510m (558 yd) per 150g; $66 Cdn.

I’ll have a few of these new bases available in today’s update, with more appearing in the near future.  I hope you’ll have a chance to give them a try!

Open house!

When I started dyeing, I worked out of my kitchen.  That was fine for a while, until my dye business grew and took over most of the first floor of my house.  It’s hard to cook when the stove’s covered in simmering dyepots, and even harder to have anyone over for dinner when the entire dining room is occupied by swifts and ballwinders and packing supplies and undyed yarn and…  Let’s just say there was a LOT of stuff crammed in there.

Dining room chaos, pre-studio days.

Late last summer, I started eyeing a spare bedroom as a possible dye studio.  I spent a lot of time moving around full-sized cardboard templates of all of the bits and pieces needed for a fully functioning dye studio (stove, dye counter, shipping counter, storage shelves, drying rack, etc.), trying to make sure that everything would fit and be functional.  The space seemed tight but doable, so I took the plunge and, with lots of help from my dad, totally transformed the space.

It’s such a delight to have dedicated space to work in!  I’ve been in the studio for about nine months now, and can report that it is the perfect size (small but mighty!) and the layout is working beautifully.

A brand spankin’ new studio!

It’s high time that I showed it off, don’t you think?

On Saturday, 14 July, I’m hosting the first-ever gobsmacked Open House, 2-5pm at 616 Walkerfield Ave. in Peterborough, Ontario.  Pop in for a quick gander and to snap up a few gobsmackers, or bring your knitting/ crochet and settle in for a chat, a cup of tea, and some sweet snacks.  I’ll have door prizes and loads of yarn available, including some bases that are new and/or not in my regular line-up.  Hope to see you there!

For more information, please check my Ravelry group.

June update

Thanks for a great update, everyone!  All of the gobsmackers are sold.  Invoices are all out, and packages will go in the mail Tuesday.  Please keep an eye on this space for details about my first-ever Open Studio event on 14 July, right here in Peterborough, Ontario.

It’s June, it’s just a couple of days after the solstice, and, O, is the light ever here!  I love these long light evenings, when I can sit on the porch and knit into the long twilight with the scent of flowers drifting through the air.  (Of course, there are mosquitos, but nothing in life is perfect, right?)  My current project is garter stitch stripes that mix and mingle at the top of the shawl– and then, when I get to the end, the stripes are going to really pop!  It’s been so fun watching the stripes play out that I’ve once again played match-maker for this update, lining up pairs of Four Quarter that would be great fun to use together for stripes.  Of course, you’re welcome to use any of the cakes in any way that you find appealing.  Have at ’em!

To claim a gobsmacker, send me an email (gobsmackedyarn@gmail.com) letting me know the name of the cake and the base.  The first person to claim a cake gets it.  Things can be pretty fast and furious at the beginning, but I promise I’ll email you back to let you know whether you got what you wanted.  Once the dust starts to settle a little, I’ll follow up with a PayPal invoice; if you haven’t ordered from me before, please include your mailing address (and phone number, if outside Canada).

Please remember that colours may vary across different devices; if you have any questions or would like a verbal description of colours, just ask.

Four Quarter: Top left: The Sun Has Come; Top right: When a Party Cake Went Wild; Bottom left: A Sherbet Sunset; Bottom right: A Bit of a Subtle Fruit

Four Quarter: Top left: Gillyweed; Top right: Mango Mash; Bottom left: Middling Marcher; Bottom right: Cyan Sensation

 

Four Quarter: Top left: Spring Folly; Top right: Walking Up Eel Creek; Bottom left: Blue-footed Booby; Bottom right: Sea and Sun Do Come

Four Quarter: Top left: When Peonies Prosper; Top right: Deep End; Bottom left: Eyeing the Waves; Bottom right: More or Less on Fire

merino fingering: There and Back Again

ASL fingering:
Top left: A Flustered Fig; Top right: Midnight Forest; Bottom left: A Quiet Coo; Bottom right: When the Frog Opened Her Eyes

ASL fingering:
Top left: What the Iris Saw; Top right: Classic Lida-Lou; Front: When the Peonies Went Skinny-Dipping

merino/ silk fingering double (1 long gradient, dyed over 2 cakes): Quiet Time

MCN giant (150g of yarn): 
Left: Balinesque; Right: Made For Monumentals

merino/ silk DK double (1 long gradient, dyed over 2 cakes): Purple Haze

BFL/ silk lace: A Right Mulberry Evening

ASC lace:
When the Clouds Dropped Down

MCS heavylace:
Simply Pretty

 

Light as a cloud

ASL is one of my favourite bases for a spring/ summer shawl.  It’s a combo of 50% alpaca, 25% silk, and 25% linen.  Now, I’ll be honest and say that ASL does not seem all that promising in the cake; it looks a bit hairy and doesn’t feel particularly soft.  In fact, when I first ordered this base, I wondered if I’d made a big mistake.

The yarn looks a bit hairy in the cake, but that disappears with blocking. 

I really shouldn’t have been concerned– this is one of those yarns, like all yarn that contains linen, that really comes to life once it’s blocked.  The hairiness disappears, the crunchy linen relaxes, and the silk comes into its own.  The result is a feather-light shawl with a light halo and incredible drape.

Lida shawl, by Bristol Ivy, knit in a single cake of gobsmacked ASL.

This is my favourite piece for spring and summer wear; the combo of alpaca, linen, and silk means that it’s surprisingly warm, yet somehow never too hot.  And so soft!

The ASL in my Lida has taken years of constant wear and is still going strong!

Why not give it a try?

Project details: Lida Shawl, by Bristol Ivy.  My version can be found here, on Ravelry.