Two new releases from Malabrigo in a row! This time, it’s not yarn at all, but unspun fleece for spinning or needle-felting. Meet Nube, soft merino wool roving in your favorite Malabrigo colorways.
We have four colors in stock: Azules, Aguas, Arco Iris, and Archangel.
Spinners and needle-felters, come by to see Malabrigo Nube in all its glory! Look for our small roving collection by the window in the front room, near our new button display. See you at the shop!
About a year ago, we introduced Acadia, a beautiful and unique dk weight yarn from the Fibre Company, a small yarn company out of Pennsylvania. We were dazzled by their array of natural fiber yarns when we saw them at TNNA, but limited ourselves to just one yarn in a small selection of colors, not knowing if our knitters and crocheters would fall for the yarn as hard as we did. In a quick succession of reorders that brought more and more new colors and project ideas to the shop, it became clear that the Fibre Company would be heartily embraced at the Hillsborough Yarn Shop. We allowed ourselves to go a little further this year, bringing in three additional Fibre Company yarns. The first two are here, and the third is expected in early October. Say hello to Fibre Company Savannah and Canopy Worsted!
Savannah is a sport weight blend of 50% wool, 20% cotton, 15% linen, and 15% soya, which is spun and dyed in the US. The wool content gives elasticity to all those plant fibers, and each fiber takes the dye a little differently, giving the colorways a rustic heathered look. We think Savannah is a perfect blend of fibers for our Southern climate, suitable for all-seasons garments and accessories.
Canopy Worsted is a light worsted weight blend of 50% baby alpaca, 30% merino wool, and 20% viscose from bamboo.
This blend of fibers makes for a lustrous, drapey fabric that still has great stitch definition for texture patterns.
Anne and I both worked on a Canopy Worsted swatch, and neither of us wanted to put it down. Yours truly has already acquired a sweaters’ worth, and put everything aside to cast on for said sweater. That said, Canopy Worsted is also well-suited to smaller accessories like scarves, cowls, hats, and shawls. For a more structured garment, like fingerless mitts, consider going down a needle size or two for a sturdier fabric.
We’re still suckers for Acadia, too–the Fibre Company made four new colors for Fall, all in neutral shades, and we ordered two bags in each color. They fill out the ever-growing Acadia spectrum nicely.
Come by the shop to see all these new yarns from the Fibre Company, and to plan your next project. We’re planning some exciting events featuring the Fibre Company in the coming weeks–stay tuned!
A new Malabrigo yarn is always exciting. We know so many knitters and crocheters who turn to Malabrigo yarns again and again for their beautiful colorways, soft fibers, and good value. Meet the newest Malabrigo yarn: Mecha.
Mecha is made of superwash merino wool, a bulky weight yarn with 130 yards on each 100 gram skein. It’s a soft and fluffy single ply, which means it’s also a bit fuzzy. The superwash process helps the yarn to resist felting, but single ply yarns are still more likely to pill than plied yarns; not a problem with a gentle pill remover like the Lily Brush.
I’m the lucky knitter who got to make a shop sample with Mecha. I went hunting for a pattern in the Kira K Designs binder and found two great choices: a twisty knit scarf, and a rippled crochet cowl.
It was a tough choice, but I landed on the Twist Scarf, a pattern that called for exactly 130 yards of bulky weight yarn–a perfect match for Mecha.
I love the way it came out; the knitting was simple and fast, and the scarf is long enough to be worn a few different ways.
The pattern is available as a Ravelry In-Store Pattern Sale, which means that you buy it from us and we’ll print a copy for you, but a digital copy is also saved in your email or Ravelry pattern library.
Ashley, a crocheter with an affinity for Malabrigo yarns, picked up a few skeins of Mecha last week when it first arrived. After playing with it a bit, she discovered that two qualities make it perfect for children’s toys: Mecha is both super soft and superwash. Sitting at the shop, she whipped up a soft stuffed ball with a rattle inside in under 15 minutes. A set of these in different sizes would make a great baby gift, and a quick one. Ashley used the Ideal Crochet Sphere pattern, which is available as a free download on Ravelry. Lucky for us, she left this ball with us as a sample for the shop. Thanks, Ashley!
Come by the shop to check out Mecha and all our other Malabrigo favorites. See you there!
For three years now, we have visited the Swans Island booth at TNNA to place orders for their exceptionally soft merino yarns which are hand-dyed in Maine. Many of our knitters have made sweaters, shawls, hats, and mitts with these yarns, then come back for more, telling us how nicely they behave on and off the needles. When we arrived at market this year to find that Swans Island had created a machine-washable yarn, we knew we had to have it.
Swans Island have made this dk weight yarn machine-washable using a new-to-the-US process called Ecowash®, which coats the yarn with an organic compound rather than stripping the scales from the fiber. This helps to prevent felting and gives the Swans Island Organic Washable a softer hand than many other superwash wools.
I knit a little baby vest for the shop using a few skeins we picked up at market, thinking how perfectly suited this yarn is to heirloom baby knits: buttery soft, minimally processed, organic, yet still machine-washable. I alternated skeins to keep this subtly semi-solid shade from pooling, and I’m glad I did; one skein was slightly darker than the other, and working back and forth between the two balls of yarn was a painless way to blend them.
The pattern is “Cabled Vest,” from Susie Haumann’s All You Knit is Love, a collection of knits for babies ages 0-18 months. The pattern calls for two Isager yarns held together, but the gauge is 5.25 stitches per inch, which is perfectly achievable using a single strand of dk weight yarn.
Besides baby things, Swans Island Organic Washable is perfect for adult garments as well as accessories. Its round shape and plump, springy quality give it excellent stitch definition for cables and other texture patterns. One 140 yard skein is plenty for a pair of Welting Fantastic Mitts, and another two will make a matching cowl. A Ravelry search sorting by gauge, looking only at patterns calling for dk weight yarns, kept me daydreaming for longer than I’d like to admit, scrolling through patterns for sweaters, shawls, and socks.
Look for the Swans Island Organic Washable yarn in the second room of the shop, sharing the spotlight with Alchemy and Smooshy with Cashmere. It’s an exciting time to visit the shop, as there seem to be new yarns arriving every week. See you there!
Right before we left for market in June, Anne started knitting a Wisdom Wrap, one of Gina Wilde’s shibori felting designs for Alchemy Yarns. We’d seen (and played dress-up with) a Wisdom Wrap at market the year before, and kept it in mind all year.
It’s an unusual piece, but simple to construct. The first step is to make long stretches of i-cord with Sanctuary, a luxuriously soft blend of merino and silk. Then stitches are picked up along the length of the i-cord and knit up into garter stitch rectangles using Silken Straw.
The end result is a kind of i-cord scaffolding, which frames the Silken Straw color-blocks. When the knitting is done, the Wisdom Wrap is ready to be felted, just like the Simple Shibori Cowl. The Sanctuary i-cord shrinks and felts, looking almost like a velvet rope, and the Silken Straw rectangles soften and stretch out. It’s a bit of a leap of faith, but having seen the finished wrap at market and tried it myself on a smaller scale with the cowl, we feel confident that a successful shibori transformation awaits. In the meantime, Anne is hard at work on the wrap, working lengths of i-cord in between blocks of garter stitch–soothing knitting.
Besides the meditative knitting process, one of the major joys of an Alchemy project is choosing from their outstanding, vibrant color palette. Though she was picking from a smaller selection, before our colors numbered in double digits as they do today, Anne put together a beautiful colorway for her Wisdom Wrap, which calls for one shade in Sanctuary and four in Silken Straw.
In selecting colors for a Wisdom Wrap, one strategy is to begin with the Sanctuary, which comes in variegated colorways. From there, you can use the same colorway in Silken Straw, and then pull out three solid colors in the Silken Straw that appear in the variegated color you’ve chosen. Anne is using Sanctuary in color “Dark Star,” and Silken Straw in “Dark Star,” “Jungle Juice,” “Citrine,” and “Coco Rosie.” As I was arranging the Silken Straw in its basket, I couldn’t help but play the Wisdom Wrap game, putting potential colorways together, sometimes following the strategy I just laid out, sometimes not.
I could play this game all day. Come in to plan a Wisdom Wrap of your own!
We’ve haven’t been carrying Ewe Ewe Wooly Worsted for much more than a year, but already it feels like a staple at the shop. This worsted weight, machine-washable merino is good for so many things, and it’s one of the softest and well-behaved yarns of its kind that we’ve found. In fact, Clara Parkes called it “the Charmin of yarns” in her Knitter’s Review.
This fall, like last fall, Ewe Ewe has introduced new colors, rounding out their palette with a true black, a pale gray, pastel hues, and a vivid orange and blue.
As a designer and the owner of Ewe Ewe Yarns, Heather Walpole is always coming up with new ways for knitters and crocheters to use Wooly Worsted, so it’s no surprise that we also have a handful of new Ewe Ewe patterns to share. Its softness and easy-care make Wooly Worsted perfect for baby things and accessories for all ages, or any kind of garment that will get a lot of wear.
I started crocheting a sample Wearever Wrap for the shop when the new Ewe Ewe colors and patterns arrived; a few afternoons later, it’s done, and ready for blocking and tassels. Crochet is speedy, indeed. Here’s a peek.
Look for these and other patterns in the Ewe Ewe binder, and come by to see the latest shades of Ewe Ewe Wooly Worsted!
This week brought big boxes of yarn from Berroco. The yarns are familiar–Ultra Alpaca Fine, Ultra Alpaca, and Lustra–but the colors are brand new, just introduced by Berroco for Fall.
Ultra Alpaca Fine is a fingering weight blend of wool, alpaca, and nylon. Its fiber content and gauge suggest socks, but Ultra Alpaca Fine is equally at home in larger garments, and especially shines in openwork scarves and shawls. The alpaca content gives it a bit of a fuzzy halo, something to keep in mind if you’re planning a project that requires sharp stitch definition–those fuzzy fibers can obscure delicate texture patterns a bit. That said, those fuzzy fibers also give the finished fabric softness and warmth. These 9 new colors really brighten the Ultra Alpaca Fine palette, and beg to be combined; perhaps a Stripe Study Shawl, or Selbu Modern tam.
Ultra Alpaca is a staple around here, an affordable worsted weight blend of alpaca and wool that comes in a multitude of colors. It’s a warm and wooly yarn, great for sweaters, hats, shawls and scarves. One of our teachers, Katherine, recently picked up some Ultra Alpaca to make the Guernsey Wrap, a happy pairing of yarn and pattern; I can’t wait to see how it comes out.
Many of the best-loved shades in Ultra Alpaca are heathered, colors which read solid from a distance but on closer inspection are subtly mottled with fibers of different hues. The latest shades in Lustra are all heathered, adding depth to these shiny, fuzzy skeins.
Lustra is a single-ply aran weight yarn, a 50/50 blend of wool and Tencel, a plant fiber derived from tree bark. It’s the Tencel that makes Lustra so lustrous, a quality that has drawn knitters and crocheters to this yarn for as long as we’ve stocked it. Like all single-ply yarns, Lustra is a little delicate, and will pill or shed fibers more quickly than plied yarns. That makes it ideal for garments that don’t get a lot of hard wear, like a cowl, scarf, or shawl; a Honey Cowl, Saroyan scarf, or Springtime Bandit shawl would be lovely made up in Lustra. Arm yourself with a Lilly Brush and you can better care for your cuddly soft single-ply garments.
Come by the shop to see these favorite yarns in brand new colors, and begin planning your next project. See you there!
Along with all the favorite sock yarns we’ve reordered, we also picked up a brand new sock yarn: Frolicking Feet, from a small yarn company out of Maine called Done Roving.
Done Roving is a family-run business based on a farm, and they make a point of sourcing their fiber domestically when possible, and processing it in a safe and thoughtful way. Frolicking Feet is their 100% superwash merino sock yarn, a fingering weight yarn with a tight twist to create a sturdy fabric. Some skeins are hand-painted, for vibrant variegated colorways, and some are kettle-dyed, for monochromatic colorways that show the full range of a single hue, from light to dark.
Frolicking Feet, like many variegated yarns, will not stripe, but may pool in unexpected ways, depending upon how many stitches are cast on. Letting the colors fall where they may is one of the pleasures of variegated yarn, but if you’d rather have a tangible sense of what that beautiful skein might look like in a finished garment, you might search on Ravelry for projects made in Done Roving’s Frolicking Feet. You’ll find all manner of garments there, from socks and shawls to sweet baby sweaters, and see how the colorways can play out in knit and crochet projects.
Come by the shop to greet our newest sock yarn, and see these vivid colors in person–my camera just can’t capture the depth and intensity of the Indigo Purple colorway, it must be seen with one’s own eyes. See you at the shop!
UPDATE: As of 11/19/2014, we are totally sold out of Crystal Palace Merino 5!
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We have many machine-washable, worsted weight wools at the shop because they’re good for so many things. Knitters and crocheters alike often turn to machine-washable, worsted weight wools for blankets, baby things, sweaters for children and adults, toys, and accessories that get lots of wear, like hats, scarves and mitts. One of the many machine-washable, worsted weight wools we carry is now on sale at a 25% discount: Crystal Palace Merino 5.
Merino 5 is a springy superwash merino wool that suggests a gauge of 5 stitches to the inch, and comes in both solid and variegatd colorways. The yarn is plump and round due to its many-plied structure, which gives it excellent stitch definition for texture and cable patterning. Crystal Palace offers a variety of free patterns for Merino 5 on their website–click here to see a list, then scroll down to the Merino 5 section. Myself, I’m eyeing this basket of yarn with colorful crocheted blankets in mind. A simple granny square or even hexagons, maybe a ripple stitch… Come by the shop to snag some Merino 5 at this great price while it’s still in stock!
A reminder: all sales are final on discounted yarn. There can be no returns or exchanges, nor special orders–the discount applies only to what we currently have in stock. Thanks!
Another luscious fingering weight yarn arrived this week: Dream in Color’s Smooshy with Cashmere.
Smooshy with Cashmere is an aptly-named blend of 70% superwash merino, 20% cashmere, and 10% nylon. It’s hand-dyed in variegated and semi-solid colorways, deliciously soft and squishy, perfect for next-to-skin wear.
We first ordered Smooshy with Cashmere about a year and a half ago, and it quickly found its following. Some knitters have used Smooshy with Cashmere for socks, for which it’s plenty hearty, but many more have used it for openwork shawls and scarves–a Multnomah or Holden Shawlette would be perfect, and both of those patterns are available as free downloads from Ravelry.
It would be equally an lovely yarn for a special baby gift–think Purl Soho’s Little Baby Sweater or one of the sweet, simple garments from Susie Haumann’s booklet All You Knit is Love.
Come by the shop to pet the Smooshy with Cashmere and plan your next project. See you there!