10 posts tagged “wollmeise”
Shortly into my Lakes holiday I finished the Absinthe Socks in Wollmeise Frosch. I am incredibly pleased with these socks. The pattern was a huge amount of fun, the yarn matched it perfectly! and they look and feel great, a perfect marriage of socks. My only slight complaint is that the cables which sit on the top of the foot where the ankle and foot meet are tight and stretch a little too much. Ii didn't irritate me while I wore them yesterday and I did walk a couple of miles out of town to visit a ruined Roman Fort so they were put through a proper test run.
I don't normally "save" special yarn for a perfect pattern but because this was my last skein of Wollmeise I did this time and I am glad that I did.
Now I have worn and washed these a lot I can attest that they yarn is still very soft and the colour has not faded at all. They truely do live up to the hype - if only it was easier to get.
I have finally finished the Austrian Socks. These are some amazing heavily cabled socks from Favourite Socks which my sister said she really like when she flicked through the book. I have been working on them for her birthday but they have taken me a very long time. I think that it is because they have such a complex pattern that I needed to take the book with me everywhere or knit them at home and they isn't the most convenient type of knitting. There was also an embarrassing ripping back incident when I thought that I had memorised the pattern and was very very wrong about that.
This will tick off part of my challenge to knit every sock in Favourite Socks no. 4 and to give my sister 3 pairs of knitted socks no 69 from 101 things. I really hope she likes them as I chose a delicate pink and green yarn that I thought she would like.
The yarn is Easyknitter's bfl in the Blossom colourway I think and as always was a dream to knit with.
I wrote a exhuberant and lyrical post last weekend all about the joys of spring to celebrate the Vernal Equinox and Vox ate it - boo! So this is round two with some added extras after J and I completed another day of serious gardening to prepare for the growing season.
The Spring Equinox came calling in several ways for me this year.
Firstly I have been growing seedlings for the garden - here are my coriander seeds.
Now every year there is always one batch of seeds I fear won't make it and this year it was the aubergines. I knew that they took 10-14 days to germinate so it shouldn't have been a surprise that at day 11 I had no seedlings. I had 3 more days to wait. However I started to assume for various reasons that this meant the seeds had failed (largely due to my own fears about using the *wrong sort of compost*). My first aubergine shoots arrived on the Equinox and I felt stupidly relieved. By day 14 of the cycle it looked like I had 10 aubergine plants. So far so good.
Lastly I cast on (and have even finished one whole sock of a pair) the Absinthe pattern from the Spring Knitty. This seasons Knitty has been my favourite for a long time. Some great socks and two shawls I would love to knit. These socks caught my eye because the bright green was so perfectly seasonal and because I too love Art Nouveau design. I have had a skein of Wollmeise in Frosch in my stash for a very long time. I was bought for me before Wollmeise got so popular that it became a scrum trying to get hold of her yarns. I had been saving it for a special pattern as I doubt I will be able to get any more for some time (I do like Wollmeise and it is exceptionally well dyed with an interesting and unusual base. But I just can't be bothered with the contest for getting hold of it and the nastiness which can come with that - I am going to happily wait until updates are less crazy and if they never get less crazy I will enjoy all the other great yarns which are just as good). Anyway. This was clearly the perfect pattern for Frosch. The semi-solid aspect of the colourway wasn't going to swamp the pattern and the green colour (which some have called Chartreuse) looked really good as an Absinthe.
Now I have knitted a fair amount of this up I am enjoying it incredibly. The colour palette is sophisticated and subtle and the base is still unusual and interesting. It is a great shame that this is my last skein but I am determined to enjoy every single inch of it and knit up all my leftovers.
One of the things I was hoping for from the 101 in 1001 challenge was an interesting time with perhaps some new experiences and a little adventure on the way. I was not expecting this to be found in the Favourite Socks challenge however.
I have been happily making the padded footlets out of some Wollmeise sock wool I had left over from making the Go With the Flow Socks for my sister. Wollmeise comes in 150g skeins so I felt confident that there would be plenty left to make a pair of footlets. Unfortunately I was wrong about this although I managed about 1 and 3/4 of a sock before it gave out. This left me with a problem. Firstly I didn't want to have to buy another 150g, secondly since the exposure on Lime and Violet Wollmeise has had a bit of a run on it. Like Posh wool it sells out in seconds and is incredibly hard to get hold off. What is a girl to do?
Enter Ravelry. I use the experimental search function to find everyone in Europe who has posted completed projects using Sonne Wollmeise Superwash. There was about 5. I sent them all a message asking to use their leftovers. 3 people replied to me. 2 of them had no leftovers because they used them up in blankets etc but the 3rd lady in Finland did. She sent it to me and refused to take any cash even for posting, although she said that the postage from Finland was less than £1. So I got 80g of Sonne in a shade very slightly darker than my Sonne but the closest match I could get.
How brilliant is this, the kindness of strangers and the ability to find them!
This is the next stop on my odessy to knit all the socks in Favourite Socks. When completed this pair will be No 10! so I am doing well so far.
I am using only leftovers to make these socks thanks to the generous yardage of Wollmeise so it feels like I am getting a pair of socks for free which is very satisfying.
I had originally thought that these would be a super fast knit, however they are actually going pretty slowly becauseof all the messing about to get the padded sole correct. I am looking forward to being able to wear them though as sometimes I do want shorter socks in the summer and I don't really own any.
I am using Wollmeise yarn on 2.25 needles and have increased the number of stitches to 72 to compensate for the smaller gauge. So far they are fitting well...
I have had a couple of items finished (or finished bar sewing on a button) for a long time now waiting to be photographed. Both of them are in red/orange type colours and I wanted to get them up while Fire is still the Project Spectrum theme (not least because everything else I am knitting at the moment is green for some strange reason).
So here are the Tudora pictures:
I love how Tudora came out and the Debbie Bliss Cashmerino was a great choice. It is incredibly soft on my neck. I will be giving this away for Christmas - probably to my Aunt if I can get over J telling me "how weird" the lopsidedness is.
These are the Wollmeise socks in Sonne - Go with the (lava) flow from Favourite Socks:
These have come up a little tight and are a smidge hard to get on. Because all socks seems to shrink a little when you wash them I don't think I will keep these but instead give them to my sister who has much thinner feet than me. That way if there is a little shrinkage she probably won't notice. I will make sure though that I get my gauge sorted before I knit up my next Wollmeise skein in Frosch as I definitely want to keep one pair of Wollmeise socks.
I don't know if I have reviewed the Wollmeise before but it is a lot stiffer than other socks yarns and not quite as soft. However the gauge swatch did soften up after washing and developed a pretty bloom. If gives the impression of being very hardwearing though and the colour made it through the washing machine with no fading at all. There isn't much pooling and flashing which I generally don't like, instead the colour comes out in a fairly event pattern all over the sock which is very pleasing to me. The dye is set very well. My only note of caution is that this is about an 8 ply or maybe 12 ply yarn with each ply being quite a tiny thin thread. On that basis I would be wary of knitting anything with lots of tiny cables as they yarn could get a little splitty. All in all I did like the yarn a lot and would definitely use it again.
I have just cast on for a new pair of socks after recently finishing the Baudelaires (photos to come). I wanted to start using some of the Wollemeise I got for Christmas and the Sonne colourway seemed to fit perfectly with the Fire theme for Project Spectrum which is currently going on at the moment. I cast on 66 instead of the 60 stitches as I was using 2.25mm needles and getting a gauge of 10 stitches to the inch (you know how I love the tiny gauge socks!)
The colours on the gauge swatch seemed to come out well (although gauge swatch often look much better than the socks as they are knitted over a smaller area and therefore have less pooling.
The ribbing is done in a very usual way doing a k1p1 into the same stitch every other row but it looks really pretty and after that there is a fairly straight forward eyelet design and some more ribbing. I was pleased to see that no
I should probably also mention that this is another pattern from Favourite Socks bringing me another step closer to making all the patterns in the book (as in challenge no 4).
This is a knitting/felting book by Kathleen Taylor which I won at Christmas time though a competition on her blog. I have not done a great deal of felting so far – I have made this small handbag which I do use on evenings out and has been good and a disastrous intarsia panel which I had to throw away in the end as it could not be salvaged.
I am in two minds about the whole process. On the one had the thick felted fabric (when it turns out correctly) can be very satisfying to look at and to touch. You can make shapes that retain a strong structure and it is very durable for bags. On the other hand it seems odd that you buy a yarn and then spend ages knitting it only for your stitches to be virtually destroyed and the look of the yarn to change beyond all recognition. To my mind this says two things 1) don’t use very expensive yarn – several people seem to felt with Manos or Malabrigo, which amazes me, but if you get the same effect with Cascade 220 then apart from the fair trade angle I don’t know why you would use the more expensive yarn. The second point is to stick to plain stocking stitch (and be careful with the colourwork as I found out to my detriment). The problem with colourwork is that the swags along the back of the work shrink more than the rest of the work and so even if you knit completely evenly (which I didn’t) the resulting felted item will still look puckered and uneven.
I am hoping that Kathleen’s book will give me more confidence with felting and show me that it is far more versatile than I realise. There are several interesting projects in here which I would like to try. Firstly the lunch box bag, I would like to make this for my sister I think. She teaches reception age children (4 yrs old) and I think that the cartoon like quality of the bag would appeal to them as well as providing a sturdy bag for her. I am intrigued by the idea of felted slippers/clogs etc. I am not sure I would wear them as I tend to either wear no shoes at all or crocs around the house but I can see that these may make great Christmas presents. There are some lovely hat patterns and I do like the idea of a felted cloche. They look very 1920s chic and although I am not 1920s chic I like the idea of having a hat which is. Finally there is the home décor section. One pattern in particular caught my eye. A novelty yarn is used with a felting yarn to make a pillow. The idea is that you end up with a study felted pillow with a novelty fun fur look. Now I know that novelty yarn is decried and I don’t love knitting with it that much myself but I do have a little left over and this seems like a great way to use it up.
All in all I am really pleased that this free book is going to widen my skill base.
I think that to do a little more experimentation with felting I should start with some flowers and leaves. I already have yarn oddments that I can use for these so it they fail I shan’t waste lots of money and if they work then I can add them to the needle case that I am decorating for myself. It will also be a good way of using the mini skein of purple worsted wool that I got free with my Wollmeise at Christmas. I love the colour and have been hoping that I could find a way to use it.
I have had some lovely knitting related gifts this Christmas from my family.
J got me some Wollmeise Sockenwolle from Germany which has the most amazing colours I think I have ever seen. The wool is very very fine, bascially fingering weight and the recommended needle size is 2.00mm to 2.50mm which is at the smaller end of the scale. However a lot of the wools I have knitted with are very very fine and this does create some lovely soft socks as the purl bumps are smaller on the sole of the foot and therefore less noticeable. I also think that this is a European fashion. In Europe the sock wools tend to be much thinner than in the US. I am told that Socks that Rock Lightweight is a similar sort of gauge to Colinette Jitterbug which is probably the thickest European yarn available. Anyway these are the skeins J got me - the yellow orange one (with the free sample of purple) is Sonne and the green one is Frosch.
Wollmeise Shop
Wollmeise now has a proper internet shop and I feel both excited and not as excited as I ought to be. The website seems lovely and I still love her range of colours (I am very excited to see the laceweight and aran yarns as well as sock) however I have never ordered or tried any Wollmeise. I know she has a huge following and looking at her eye for colour I can completely understand it but I have been burned before by yarns that looked better than they were.
However Wollmeise is German and I am very excited to see the start of what I hope will be a rise in EU indie dyers to compete with the US indie dyers. Not only will there be less airmails in shipping but also shipping etc will also be cheaper however on a purely artistic level it is really good to have some EU dyers to rival the US big name indie dyers.
However on her original website she has a really nice looking Mobius Shawl made out of her sock wool which I am seriously thinking about making for A for her Birthday/Christmas next year. It is a lovely design, simple and strikingly effective and above all free on the site!
New Magknits
For a while I really wasn’t sure about Magknits. They went through a couple of blips and the number of patterns per issue really tailed off. However they are monthly and do fill the gap whilst waiting for a new Knitty and they have launched some of the big trends like the Jaywalkers by Grumperina. This issue I feel is again getting back up to a great standard. They have a nice plain cardigan in black which is DK weight and may be an excellent way of using the Artesano Alpaca Hummingbird after I decided I really didn’t like Kaleidoscope after all. There is a neat little pair of socks and a couple of baby items one of which is designed by Nikol Lohr from Naughty Needles!
New Anticraft
I can find Anticraft a little hit and miss sometimes but their Vinnland socks which I am currently enjoying from Beltane are spot on.
This issue has a spidery theme in keeping with the Halloweeny nature of the release date and has a really cute Charlotte’s web inspired scarf which I like the look of but would never wear. I did like the way of making patterned napkins though which reminds me a lot of the Threadbanger’s T-Shirt stencilling. The Anti-craft is something which I really love exists but haven’t found a huge amount of patterns I want to make.
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