Knit & Knag Designs

While I was at TNNA, I spoke with a great many yarnies and saw an amazing variety of yarn.  Some of it followed me home and will be converted to brand new designs.

Alisha Goes Around was amazingly generous to designers, and offered a huge variety of yarn.  Her colours are rich and varied, and her bases are amazing.  The gray one on the left is a laceweight yarn (Twittering of Magpies) with the slightest hint of metal sparkle in it.  You can barely see it, but every so often a sparkle catches the light.  It’s amazing – and unlike a lot of the sparkle yarn I have seen, I am really drawn to this one because it’s so subtle.

The other three yarns are fingering weight, which I always love for making shawls.  ….and maybe also for the new fingerless mittens I’ve been plotting.

At Lorna’s Laces I was treated to two skeins of fingering weight yarn – one is their brand new base Solemate, and the other is Shepherd Sock.  Amanda Jarvis picked the colours for me, and she had an uncanny sense for what I would like.  The two skeins she picked out were just perfect.

Roxanne at Zen Yarn Garden had this gorgeous Serenity Lace II in a midnight blue that makes me think of dark, starlit nights in distant lands.  “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away…..”    ….ok, maybe not that one, but you know the type, with flying carpets, handsome princes and perhaps a genie or two.

Artyarns from White Plains, NY is a brand new company for me.  While they have been around since 2002, I have never encountered them before, but it was a delightful new acquaintance.  They make really high-end yarn with a lot of glitter and sequins.  As well as some drop dead gorgeous cashmere.  The red skein is their Cashmere-1 and in for some reason my camera cannot capture just how dark burgundy this colour is.

I actually met Iris and Elliot in the hotel bar, along with Daniela (their European representative) and Judy from Fabulous Yarn.  Elliot told me all about the yarn they make, and I had the chance to see what everyone was knitting too.  Amazing stuff.  So the next day I had to go to their booth and of course I fell in love with their cashmere in particular.  The second skein is Rhapsody light – a silk/mohair blend, and I’m really curious how that will knit up since I haven’t really worked with mohair before.

Megan of Skeined Alive is actually an old friend from the Sanguine Gryphon Dyecamp a couple of years ago.  While I haven’t dyed a single skein of yarn since the dye camp, Megan was enamoured and ran with it.  She’s created her own line of yarns which she sells on Etsy.  I ran into her during a class with Cat Bordhi, and then spent a few hours with her and Madalene of Knit One Weave Two.  Anyway, this is one of Megan’s yarns.  Apparently a friend of hers asked her to dye a yarn with “all the colours from my compost bin”, and here is the result.  Appropriately named “Vermiculture”.  I love it!  (And I promise you, while it has all of the colours of the compost bin, it has none of the less desirable attributes…..)

I also had the opportunity to meet Anzula from California.  I actually initially met them because they were rooming with Jaala of Knitcircus, but of course I had to stop by their booth at the show too.  And I was blown away by all their clear and bright colours.  They seemed to be going with a theme of hot pink and gray for the show, and it looked spectacular.  Anzula will be sending me some of their Milky Way yarn for a double-knit project that I’ve been planning for some time.  It was really hard to choose colours, but I ended up with the above combination of “Elephant” and “Cornflower”.

Additionally, I chatted with a number of other companies about their yarns and I think I have found the absolute perfect yarn from Claudia Handpainted Yarns – it’s a secret project (of course…..) that has been looking for yarn for quite some time, but I’ve never really found the right one.  This one though, is really spot on.  I can’t wait to get knitting.

All that said – I don’t want to total the number of km of yarn that may have followed me home from TNNA.  Whatever that number is, I’m sure it’s greater than what found it’s way back here from the Frolic in Toronto in April.  Amazingly, I have plans for lots of it already.  So on that note, I guess I should get knitting.