2016 Clubs!

Since I apparently needed a LOT more caffeiene when I posted my last WIP post not on a Wednesday and not even on the right day, I'm bypassing that category this Wednesday to talk about Wooly Wonka clubs for 2016!  Note that all club sign-ups will be open through December 31, 2015 (the fiber club will be open for those quarterly sign-ups throughout 2016 as well).

This year, I'm offering 3 clubs (with a preview of another new offering if you make it all the way through this post at the end!):  The Heroines Shawl Club and a subscription Sweater Club for knitters, and a fiber club for handspinners.

Let's start with the fiber club.  It'll be similar in format to last year's.  Each month you will receive 4 oz of either a 100% wool, a wool and something blend (like merino/tencel, BFL/silk, etc.) or a custom blended roving.  Since the club is set up in quarters of the year, you'll get one of those bases every 3 months.  You have the option of picking a handpaint or a tonal/kettle dye option.  On the months I send out the blended roving, everyone will get the same roving.  You may opt to do more than 4 oz, of course!  Shipping is included in the price, and you can sign up for just 3 months at a time, or go for the whole year and get yourself a discount.  Our theme for 2016 will be Art Gallery. Think colorways inspired by great masterpieces of art - Botticelli, Van Gogh, Dali, Degas.   Packages will ship around the 15th of every month.

Next up, a new addition to the line-up, the Sweater Club.   This club will get you enough yarn to knit two hand-dyed sweaters and their patterns during the course of 2016.

The first sweater will be a DK-weight cardigan, with my brand-new Aeslin DK superwash merino as the base. It will have a simple knit/purl texture pattern for the body, with the sleeves and upper raglan yoke knit in stockinette, and a casual, boxy fit. The yarn and pattern will arrive mid-March 2016.
The second sweater will be a fingering-weight cardigan, knit with Artio Sock, which is a 50/50 silk/blue-faced Leicester wool blend. It will have some optional waist shaping, with lace patterning on the back and set-in sleeves, with a bit more tailored fit; a great layering piece for the changeable weather of early fall. The yarn and pattern will arrive mid-September. (If you loved the Aspens cardigan from Free Spirit Knits, you’ll like this one).
You can pick and choose from multiple sizing options and can select any of the tonal-dyed colorways available in the shop Gallery section. All of your yarn will be dyed at the same time, so it will be the same “dye lot” for your project. Club members will receive both sweater patterns delivered as PDFs into your Ravelry library. The club will allow you to break up the cost of two hand-dyed sweater lots over 4 installment payments during the year, with payments for the remaining 3 installments due March 1st, June 1st and September 1st. Previews of the sweaters will be available in mid-January and mid-July, so you can select colors that best suit the projects and your personal preferences (and I’ll be sending out reminder emails to club members so they have plenty of time to pick).

And finally, the Heroines Shawl Club.  We’ll again have six shawl projects in the club this year, with the first one shipping out the first week in January, and then every other month (so March, May, July, September and November 2016). You will again have the option of choosing just the ebook collection that has patterns only, opting for an installment payment for the yarn/patterns or paying upfront for the entire year (which gets you the deepest discount). Each shawl project will be a different shape, ranging from half-hexagon, to a rectangle, to circular, and a few others in between.

The themes for 2016 will be:

• Freya from the book Iceland by Betsy Tobin. This will be on the Arianrhod Sock base (SW merino/silk/glitter), and will feature a gradient colorway based on fire and ice.
• Gustine from the book “The Dress Lodger”. This will be on Nimue Sock (50/50 SW merino/silk) in a mid-range cornflower blue. Genevieve from “The Lady and the Unicorn”. This will be a warm rich red on Aeslin Fingering (100% SW merino).
• Jo March from “Little Women.” This will be on a brand-new club-exclusive sockweight yarn (50/50 alpaca/merino) in a dark earthy gray with a heathery look.
• Lily Owens from “The Secret Life of Bees”. This shawl will be knit from a tricolor/gradient on Ceridwen Sock (100% SW merino) in warm honey golds.
• Isabella Byrd who wrote a series of memoirs in the form of letters back home to England while she was exploring the western mountains (Colorado to Nevada) on horseback, and knitting her way through all of that!  This be on Artio Sock (50/50 BFL and silk) in a dark forest green.

All the shawls will be full size, so at least 600 yards of fingering-weight yarn each. Shawls will also be intermediate in terms of skill set - all the motifs will be charted and not written out.

Whew!  Made it this far through this very long post? If so, then I'll sneak in just one more little bit of information.  Beginning in January 2016, I will be carrying self-striping sock yarns.  Each month I'll introduce a new color and in 2016, I'll be focusing on Colors of New Mexico.  January's colorway will be "Santa Fe", a gorgeous 4-color set of stripes.  This color will be available for the first 3 months of 2016 for orders, with a new color added every month.  These will all be on a custom-dye basis, so you can pick from one of four sock yarn bases and have it dyed up just for you.  More to come later in the month of December with some sneak peeks and info on KALs and giveaways!

WIP Wednesday: November 18, 2015

Sekret Knitting:

• Thanks to a couple of evenings in my hotel and not going out to be social after a day of vending, I am on the final repeat of the large lace project.  That should be done and blocked by this weekend.  It's already been reviewed by my TE, so it's ready to roll out of here to the publication shortly.
• I've been working on the first Heroines Shawl Club 2016 pattern.  I'm done the first lace pattern on that and just started the second.  I'll be feverishly working away on that while I wait for yarn to arrive for.....
• Another deadline project that's a long jacket with colorwork.  That'll be a dash and a half to get it knit by the end of December's deadline but I think I can get that accomplished. 

Personal Knitting:  I've been working a bit on my second iteration of Mesa Verde, and I've got one more full and one half pattern repeat left to finish up.  If I have some down-time this week, I'll see what I can get knit on that, but re-entry post the Kid N Ewe festival, plus a teaching night and a photo shoot on Friday, probably means not much will be happening there.  

WIP Wednesday: March 4, 2015

Sekret Knitting:

• I started the next shawl for the Heroines Shawl club.  I am planning for it to have 4 sections, or maybe a fifth if I've got enough yardage, and I'm almost finished the first section.  My goal is to finish that section, and try to work thru the second section.
• The other shawl project is still on hold. 

Personal Knitting: 

• I cast on for the Furrow mittens by Kirsten Kapur.  I'm using some Harrisville Worsted from stash in Fawn and Teak with a bit of black for the contrast rows in the cuffs.  I had to drop down two needle sizes to 5s, and I wound up not increasing sts after the cuff was finished, since these were coming out pretty large.  I'm going to try to finish up mitten #1 this week.

• I also cast on a pair of socks: The Long Dark of Moria by Claire Ellen.  She had originally knit these using Wooly Wonka Fibers Arianrhod Sock, but I had a skein of Aerten Sock in the same colorway (Avalon), so I decided to use that.  I had originally cast these on thinking I'd knit on them in the car while we drove back and forth to Taos this weekend, but then we didn't make the trip, so these will likely be my travel project for when I go to Dallas/Fort Worth in another few weeks.  Nothing specific I want to get done on these - if I feel like working on them, and have the mitten finished, I'll pick them up for a bit. 

Pattern Release: Misselthwait Manor Shawl

The March Heroines club pattern, Misselthwait Manor, is now live.

This is a Faroese-style shawl with a center back panel of a climbing roses lace motif, with small floral sprig lace motifs on the side panels.  It is finished off with a floral eyelet border.

I knit this using a new-to-the-shop yarn, Aeslin, which is a light fingering weight yarn, but one of my testers also knit it in Ceridwen, which is a true fingering weight yarn, and it came out beautifully as well.

A big thank-you to Dilshani Tyson Photography for the gorgeous pictures!

Pattern Release: The Mad Queen Shawl

This is the first pattern release in the year-long Heroines Shawl Club for 2015, the Mad Queen Shawl.

The inspiration behind this piece is Johanna of Castile (also known as Johanna the Mad) was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and the older sister of Katharine of Aragon. Poised at the crux of multiple powerful Tudor-era families, she was married to the heir to the Holy Roman Empire, and should have been a powerful ruler in her own right. After the death of her husband, she was declared insane and incarcerated in a nunnery while her father ruled as regent for her son, Frederick. Debate about whether she was truly suffering from a mental illness or simply a pawn in the political intrigues of Europe at this time still surrounds her.

This shawl is a half-circle shape, worked with two types of increases from the center back neck down to the hem. The pattern features intertwined Tudor cables and floral lace patterns, and is finished with a simple lace bind-off, to form a cape-like shape.

The original sample was knit with two skeins of Wooly Wonka Fibers' Laysa Sock yarn in the colorway Castile.  The sample took almost all of the 800 yards for those skeins to complete.  It could be knit with any fingering-weight yarn with a firm twist and without much halo to show off all the stitch patterns. 

I'm so happy with how this design came out!