Happy New Year, readers!

2010 was a strange one around here.  A fantastic year for Wildcraft, but not such a great year for various friends and family.  Misfortunes seemed to tumble one after another.  I won't go into detail, but I for one am very glad to see the turning of the year.

I have happy knitting news for my first blog post of 2011.  I've learned to knit stranded colourwork!

These are made from Posh Yarn's Winter Cottage Mitten kit, which came with a pattern and two skeins of lovely merino/cashmere yarn to knit with.  The kit had languished in my stash for over a year, as I was a bit intimidated by the stranded colourwork.  But during the snowy weather in December I decided I needed a snuggly pair of mittens, so I gritted my teeth and cast on.

Working the fairisle pattern wasn't nearly as bad as I feared.  In fact, it was much, much better than I expected.  I'd recently taught myself to knit continenental style, so for the stranded sections I could hold one yarn in each hand, which made alternating the coloured stitches a breeze.  The first mitten's a bit lumpy, as it took me a while to get my tension even across both yarns, and there are a few mistakes where I mis-read the chart, but mitten no. 2 is nearly perfect.  Washing them made a near-miraculous difference to the texture of the fabric too, the yarn bloomed beautifully and you can barely feel the iffy tensioned bits.

I found the colourwork so addictive to knit, that these were done in less than a week, and as soon as I cast off, I was looking for another stranded mitten pattern to knit.  Then this happened:

Yep, I found another lovely pattern to work, this time with my own handspun yarn.  The pattern's Ysolda Teague's Cotton Reel Mittens, the pink yarn is some that I made with Fyberspates Nef Fibre (cashmere/baby alpaca/silk), and the white is from my own BFL/alpaca/silk/angelina sparkle batts.  Both yarns are adorably soft and cuddly.  They're making quite a dense fabric on 3.25mm needles, so the mitts are quite chunky to wear, but I love them already.

All this has sparked a renewed interest in all kinds of stranded colourwork for me.  When I first learned to knit, it was the traditional Shetland and fairisle designs that inspired me most,  I loaned all the Alice Starmore and Kaffe Fassett books I could find in my local libararies and pored over the patterns.  I especially loved the heathery colours and the muted shades of traditional Shetland yarns.  But I'm not a natural knitter, so learning the basics has taken me a long while.  I am very excited to find that I finally am good enough to knit the designs I've always wanted to make, and even more so to find that they work with my handspun yarns.

With that in mind, I set about blending up some dyed tops from my stash, into batts that I could spin for stranded colourwork.

They're all blends of fine wool with a luxury fibre, some of it's silk, some mohair, and one set's with soy fibre.  I'm very much looking forward to working with these fibres.

I've also invested in some more books to help me (some of them as excellent bargains via Amazon's secondhand sellers).  So I now have in my library:

The Art of Fair Isle Knitting: History, Technique, Color & Patterns: History, Technique, Color and Pattern, by Anne Feitelson

Poetry in Stitches, by Solveig Hisdal

Magnificent Mittens and Socks, by Anna Zilboorg

and

Fair Isle Knitting, by Sarah Don

That should keep me busy for a while!