Spring Self-Striping

I am very happy to share with you my two new self-striping yarns!

I love the greens in this first one. It's a great St. Patrick's day colorway, and I have to give credit to my husband for the name. I asked him "what's a good name for a yarn that has to do with both St. Patrick's day and dogs?" and almost immediately he came up with "Luck of the Irish Wolfhound." I was sold, and the name stuck. 

The next one was intended more as an all around spring color, but it screams Easter which is ok with me! This one is called "Springtime Frolic" and lets just say that the bright pink stripe is brighter that it looks in the picture. It pops for sure, which is what I was going for. 

There will be another post coming but if you live in the Portland area I will be doing a trunk show at Black Sheep at Orenco during the Rose City Yarn Crawl  on Thursday March 5th and Friday March 6th and would love to see you there! 

More Treats

A few posts ago I wrote about my self-striping yarn called "Trick or Treats." I've been knitting up some socks to see how the color stripes turn out. I really like the final result: 

Sample sock

This is my own pattern. I started on the toe using Judy's magic cast on and increased until I had 64 stitches (this is the typical number of stitches that I cast on with size 1 needles to fit my foot). I kept knitting until I got the the heel. I decided to use an afterthought heel at this point so that the striping sequence wouldn't be disrupted. 

When I got to the middle of the orange stripe I knit in a piece of scrap yarn on half of the stitches (32 in this case) and then just continued knitting as usual. Once I cast off the top of the sock I went back to finish up the heel. 

I went back to the scrap yarn that I had knit in and took it out while picking up stitches as I went. Then I figured out where the halfway point was in one of the orange strands of yarn and started knitting in much the same way that I would make a toe in a cuff-down sock. I decreased down to 32 stitches then used the kitchener stitch to close the end. 

Picking up stitches to start the heel. 

Once I finished this sock I weighed the remaining yarn and determined that if I used a different ball of yarn for the toe and heel then I could get a 2nd and 3rd sock out of the same ball of yarn. For this pair I used Emily O'Grady's Vanilla Bean Striped Sock recipe. 

Vanilla Bean Sock Recipe

I love how this one turned out and I'm about halfway through making the next one. I'm also dyeing up some more of this colorway as I type this to re-stock my shop. Keep an eye out for it soon!