Really Good New Yarn

It's Chromium from Neighborhood Fiber Co.: 69% silk noil, 31% stainless steel. Yep, stainless steel. See how it glimmers in the photo below? The color is Georgetown.

You know I like designing with silk/stainless yarn.

And now that yarn is available from Baltimore's own Neighborhood Fiber Co. As soon as Karida dyed the first batch, I snatched some in Charles Village and paired with with Neighborhood Fiber Co. Loft in Victorian Village to make Iodine, a cowl that plays with the color and texture of both yarns. For those averse to mohair, you can substitute Capital Luxury Lace (a sample in that combination is being knit now!).

Cowl photo with undyed yarn background

Neighborhood Fiber Co. publicity photo

Now that I have a feel for the yarn and what it does, I'm swatching with bigger projects in mind. A t-shirt. Perhaps a cardigan.

Knit in Stockinette stitch, this is what it does. It stands up. It ripples like a sea creature. It practically designs itself.

Want to see all this goodness in person? Neighborhood Fiber Co. and Weaverknits will have a booth at the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival next weekend. Louise has taken the weekend off! There will be Chromium. And Monomanias. And  kits. And new Rustic DK. Samples galore. Books. Patterns. BE THERE!

Meet Louise

who works as a temporary waiter, principally at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Baltimore. This weekend was the Grand Prix of Baltimore, which closes most of downtown and creates crowds in and around the Hyatt. Louise was needed in the Hyatt Bistro!

Who got a working pass? Louise did! (Louise was my Grandma Weaver's name, which is why I picked it out of the Hyatt name tag bag. One of her signature phrases was, "Oh, Boy." That came to mind often this weekend, as in, Oh, boy, this is intolerably loud.)

It's no secret that I often take jobs just because I think they're interesting, and that was certainly the case here.

Throughout the summer, I've been doing a LOT of knitting, and I'll be unveiling some new projects here over the next few weeks. First is a new hat design (I talked about this earlier) called Fixation. It's the companion hat for Monomania: a way to use up leftovers or experiment with stripe and color combinations before committing to the cardigan. So far, I've made three, the two I showed in the previous post, and one from Three Fates Eponymous sock yarn. I bought a mini 10-pack last year at Knit Fit! in Seattle, and it was just the right amount of yarn to make this hat. Amazing!

I just knit until I ran out of each color, then I joined the next one. Great fun.

Until the end of September, the Fixation pattern is only $3 here. Use the code 911fixation at checkout. Now, go crazy! Louise is going to take a nap.