Peruvian Highland wool yarn

This week, while at my LYS I fell in love with a new yarn. As I held it I instantly knew it’s potential. It comes in lovely 50g skeins, so I could really squish and caress, and yes, this stuff is amazing. Why didn’t I see it before? Because I was like a schoolgirl, with a schoolgirl crush on elite British wools, I guess that I had my eyes closed.

Colors left to right : Natural, Doeskin, Charcoal, and Jet.

I bought four skeins for barely more than $20, and brought them home in their cheery little orange paper bag. It felt wonderful. I showed it to Jeff , who is my scratchiness barometer (that is, he is an extreme case of FOSW ~~ fear of scratchy wool) and he was impressed with it ! So in recent days I have been thinking about my new find. I have decided that as a developing designer, it is important that I am ‘yarn conscienscious’, yet not yarn elitist. Well, in most cases. That is, in most cases I will design something entirely for itself, using a yarn that I feel compliments the design, and also that I feel is easily accessible, and easily affordable. ((Though , still, there are those special design occasions to showcase beautiful specialty & heritage yarns, for which I am very happy to be elitist . . . lol )).

Color : Natural

A challenge indeed. One of the reasons I have liked Jamiesons Of Shetland Spindrift, a 2ply fingering yarn, is because it is not expensive, but very affordable, considering it’s imported from the actual Shetland Isles. However, I have learned by observation, that not everyone has easy access to this British wool , even though it is growing in popularity as the boundless community of the internet brings us knitters together globally.

Color : Doeskin Heather

I am talking about a very popular yarn which I never noticed because I was maybe being a bit of a yarn snob. Yet at the same time, I developed this closet tendency to buy inexpensive yarn on-line. Strange indeed. Though I adore the ease of my on-line purchases , I do happen to live up in the backwoods, and it’s not always cost-effective to drive to the next county to purchase exactly what I want. I have had a yarn epiphany regarding this LYS exclusive . . .

Color : Charcoal

I’m talking about Cascade 220 yarn folks, in fingering weight. 100% Peruvian Highland Wool. 50g skeins = 273 yards / 250 meters. 2 ply. About $5 per skein. What I have here is four neutral undyed colors in Jet, Charcoal, Doeskin, and Natural.

Cascade 220 fingering : Jet

Striking resemblance to the yarns with which I created my Vineyard Rows Highland Bonnet .

My Vineyard Rows bonnet (tam) however, will remain a Jamiesons Spindrift novelty , as it is inspired so much by Scottish Highlands that I believe the Scottish wool is completely perfect, but I will list the Cascade 220 fingering as an alternate yarn on it’s pattern pages.

You can guess that the next up & coming thing I am working on , will be a Vineyard Rows design, and in the yarn which is beautiful yet humble and very likely at your own LYS. I still have a crush on Virtual Yarns Hebridean and Jamiesons Of Shetland, but perhaps I’ll broaden my more local horizons , this side of The Pond. I tell you, Peru really has it going on these days when it comes to yarn !

Finally the rain clouds have come and rained and everything is moist and the forest smells wonderfully spicey with Autumny smells. We’ve had rain this week enough to soak the forest and give the moss a good drink and I just love rain ~~ just look at those clouds !

I went for a knitting walk with this blue lump of a sweater, with about a half ball of yarn at the start, thinking I’d have plenty for a long walk. I managed to get all the way back to the house, and ran out of yarn *just* as I walked in through the door, just enough to splice on to another ball ~ I call this a grand knitting coincidence !

I’m almost at the section of the Michigan Winter Sweaters (thats two) where I must fuss about with a tedious new technique ~ the seamless ‘shirt yoke’ that I have never tried ~ which will involve knitting back and forth on a lopsided saddle shoulder which is wider on the back than the front, and knits itself into the body as it goes. This horizontally eating up the end of the vertical stitches, is making me nervous, because I’ve never done a seamless saddle-shoulder, but sounds exciting all the same ! Bless Elizabeth Zimmerman for writing the instructions out so dearly, but still I am not at all confident, because I really just am not a very good reader-of-knitting-instructions… don’t be surprised if I come back here and calling for help in another post soon.