I just received a box of yummy, yarny goodness from KnitPicks this week to feed my yarn stash! These skeins are for a new on-going project that I am very excited about. The summer yellow is from their Gloss line and it’s a merino and silk blend I’ll use for prototyping. The speckled yarn is called Hawthorne and is a superwash and nylon. I’ll be using that for the first round of finished pieces.
As any good needle worker know’s, your stash of fiber is vital to your work. It is like having my own mini yarn boutique filled with the most choice selections. It’s really a thing of joy.
But buyer beware. It can go from a lovely collection of favorites, to hoarding madness in a heartbeat and whoever comes over to your place will be quick to give side-eye if it gets to the point where one clearly needs a yarn intervention. A sign that things are out of control is when you forget what you have. Which I did. So I cataloged everything and didn’t buy any yarn for about 5 years, forcing myself to only use stash yarn. Also, rather than buying several skeins of one-of-a-kind yarn just because I like it, if I don’t have what I want for the project in my stash, then I focus on finding the perfect yarn. But just for that project. I don’t buy more than I need.
Another thing I’ve begun to do is more prototyping. I’ve did it off and on in the past, mostly just with the patterns that I’ve created, but going forward I think it will be a huge benefit to work through all patterns that way to make sure I understand all the finer details. Especially since I am highly likely to alter patterns created by others, I think it is best to find out what works and what won’t *before* I work on a project with expensive yarn. Will this mean I need more yarn for both phases? Not really since I’ll just reuse most of the prototype yarn.
My prototyping go-to is Gloss. For being merino and silk, it’s extremely affordable. Also, the palette for the line are flat colors so this yarn won’t lie to you. You can see every stitch and error and experimental direction crystal clear which is perfect. As for the Hawthorne, this is the first time working with this sort of colorway. I liked how this speckled yarn from KnitPicks was very subtle. Time will tell if the speckled yarn works for me.
What does all this mean? It means I have some exciting new projects coming down the pipeline that I’ll share.
Stay tuned!