Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Lorna's Laces Green Line, socks and baby vest



Arriving this week is the new Lorna's Laces Green Line. It is an organic yarn. Here are a couple pictures of a swatch I did.


The yarn has a nice hand. Just enough body to show cables, seed and other textures quite well, but still has a nice soft feel to it. Since this is hand dyed, you will see slight variances of dye shades. I really like this look.


These swatches were done on a US#9 needle, and did work out perfectly to the 4 sts per inch that the ball band indicates.


This is an angle shot so you can see how the stitches have body. I'm hoping the angle shot shows the shadows. The store has really good lights, so it might not show the shadows as well as I wanted.


Other news I received is that Cascade just told me that there are MORE new colors in 220, 220 Superwash, Pastaza, Baby Alpaca Chunky and even more colors in the new Heritage Sock Yarn.


I don't have these up yet. In fact, I don't even have pictures of them from Cascade yet.


The Heritage Sock Yarn is selling quite well. One hank will do a pair of socks. $12 for one hank is a good price for this quality of yarn. I'd rate it as an upper mid-range quality. So if your budget doesn't allow for Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock, the Heritage Sock Yarn would be a good alternative. I passed off a hank to my Mom who learned to knit socks with the Cadillac of yarns, Shepherd Sock. She's sampled other yarns for me in the store. So far she reports that it doesn't split and knits off the needle quite nicely. When her sample is complete, I'll post her final report.



Shop Socks! Starting at left: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sport. Knit on the LK150 knitting machine.
Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in color Hawaii. Knit on a standard gauge knitting machine.
This is Fiber Trends House Sock Pattern. It uses 2 strands of worsted. Our sample is Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted. I lined up the colors so most of the time the 2 strands were in the same color. The cuff is in some novelty yarn we used to carry way back.
Finally, this is Cascade's Sassy Stripe. Hand knit by my Mom, Gisela. She uses Knitting Pure and Simple's Beginner's Basic Sock #216. See one of my sock pages for this pattern.



Return to my heart's pleasure, I pulled out the baby's vest pattern I've slowly been working on. The yarn is Lorna's Laces Swirl Chunky. The largest size is complete. I'm still assemblying and photographing the process in the smaller sizes. This is a fun pattern to knit up. Goes fast. But when you only have 2-3 hours a week, if you are lucky, to work on this, the pattern writing/proofing/sampling process is incredibly slow. But I'm not giving up!