Category: Knitting

Sometimes a knitter needs a yarn with exquisite drape, but enough shape for lace to show beautiful and cables to twine in perfect relief from a field of stockinette or garter.  Enter Yak Silk DK.  65% Superwash Merino, 20% Silk, and 15% Yak. Each skein has 231 yards of lovely, plump yarn.

This week, Yak Silk DK will has its premiere in the Elliebelly Etsy Shop.  Pictures here: Camden, Tin Roof, and Hula Girl. Knit a hat or some fingerless mitts in a single color or combine two or more for a shawl. This yarn will knit up at a true DK weight and it’s a pleasure to knit with.

This week, I knit a hat without a pattern.  This isn’t something I’ve done before – I’m not crafty like that.  But, I’m in love with my newest Elliebelly colorway, Sorbonne (see this post), and, in the course of playing with it, I ended up with a hat.

I started out with a tubular cast on, and since I knit with this yarn, Elliebelly’s Aran Blue Faced Leicester, a good bit, I knew enough about my gauge to feel comfortable going ahead without swatching.  Tubular cast ons always feel tight, and I was second guessing the stitch count I chose for the first few inches.  It looked small!  But sure enough, it looked better the further I knit, and now, with the hat finished, the size is perfect.  I love the tubular cast on – it has a professional looking rolled edge with no apparent beginning and it’s very stretchy.

The tubular cast on starts with waste yarn.  I just happened to have a scrap of some farm yarn I had dyed in the “Little Girl in the Big City” colorway lying around that was long enough for a provisional cast on, so I used that. And, as I knitted the 2×2 ribbing for the band, I kept stopping to admire how nicely Sorbonne, the main colorway, set off the bit of Little Girl on the edge.  My original plan was to knit some arched cables all the way around the hat, and after sketching it out and knitting the hat about halfway, I realized I was still focused on how the two different colorways looked together.  There was nothing for it.  I wanted stripes.  So, I frogged back to the end of the ribbing and started back in stockinette, this time, with the addition of the stripes as I got about the halfway point.  No pattern, so I knit until I had just the pop of color I wanted from each of the stripes.

I did some decreasing at the top.   I started with 96 stitches, and used three decease rows, separated with 5 rows in between them, to get down to 50 stitches, with I threaded closed. With the addition of an oversized pom pom, my hat is complete.

The Grannie Annie shawl has a lot of old-fashioned virtues to recommend it. It is based on a feather and fan lace pattern and is a traditional crescent shape. But it is definitely not a shawl your granny would have knit, although I feel quite certain she would have loved it had she had the opportunity to.

The fabulous color play and scalloped shape! And it’s absolutely a piece of fluff, knit in Plucky’s amazing Cashmere aran, “Cachet” yarn. 

In a last little bit of serendipity, I ran short on the pale blue yarn and did the bind off in the gray colorway. This little finishing touch really makes the shawl for me, framing the colors and giving it a bit of stability it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

I’m thrilled with this shawl and can’t wait to give it the gentle steam blocking it needs to open up the lace so I can wear it.

Bad news first: the Elliebelly.com website isn’t quite ready yet. It’s a little buggy, and we are working on that. 

But, I’m stocking a bit of yarn and roving in my etsy shop today, just to get the hang of it. There will be everything from single skeins of sock yarn, to sweater quantities of yarn, to roving showing up periodically today, so please drop by for a look.

Smitten.

I’m helplessly, hopelessly in love.

This is Smitten 120, the newest addition to Elliebelly. It’s a single-ply yarn in a fingering weight, spun from 20% Silk, 15% Yak, and 60% Merino Wool.  It comes in 120 gram/523 yarn skeins, so that one skein is  perfect for shawl knitting.  The details completely fail to capture my love for this yarn.  I love it in the skein.  It’s so soft and so pretty.  Yak is lustrous, soft and has good elasticity, so blended it with the silk and fine merino, it’s a beautiful yarn with just a hint of halo.  It’s everything good in a shawl/scarf yarn.  It will make lovely hats.  And I’m already thinking about sweater possibilities. The sample is knit up in Llyr, one of the colorways that was developed to take advantage of the qualities of Smitten, and the pattern is Lamassu.  You can see Judi’s project page here.

I’ve fallen so hard for this yarn that I’m planning to add a DK version as well (perhaps I’ll take advantage of that to knit the sweater I’m dreaming about).  I’m over the moon about this yarn — you know that wonderful feeling when something you think you’re going to love wildly exceeds all of your expectations? I love Smitten, and can’t wait to make it available to you when we reopen later this month! Make sure you sign up for our newsletter so you’ll know all the details.