EYF round-up

The Edinburgh Yarn Festival happened and I bought many things. Let's see how I did.

Plan: buy buttons for two baby cardigans.
Result: two sets of cute buttons from Textile Garden

I've sewn on the owl buttons and I'm working on the purple ones today. I find sewing buttons so tedious, but the result is worth it. Look for an FO post for these two cardigans soon!

Plan: buy yarn for Liesl.
Result: three skeins of Triskelion Elmet Aran (this particular yarn isn't on Ravelry yet, link is to other yarns from this company)



Triskelion Yarns blew me away and were my favourite discovery of this year. Beautiful rainbow colours in really interesting, gorgeous yarn blends. The one I bought is BFL/Masham. I don't know anything about Masham sheep, but the yarn is fabulous - a bit rustic, but also smooth. Looks to be hard-wearing. The colour is a beautiful forest green that matches some buttons I already have - yay for button stash-down! Can't wait to knit with it and I'd love to try some of their other bases.


Badly lit picture of the fantastic Triskelion stall.

Plan: Wollmeise
Result: So much Wollmeise
I thought I'd go for Lace-garn and DK, but in the end I went for Lace-garn and Pure.


The lace yarn I bought is the purplest I've ever seen. (Do not be fooled if the photo makes it look blue). Colourway: Der letzte versuch. This will be some kind of cardigan, pattern to be determined. It feels heavy for laceweight - more of a light 4-ply.


Wollmeise Pure in the Sabrina colourway. This is actually teal, not grey/blue/green. TEAL. SO MUCH TEAL. Two skeins should be enough for a sweater, and I'm thinking of making Low Tide by Tin Can Knits. (I bought the book containing this pattern at EYF last year, so things come full circle.) I got these skeins wound by my good friends volunteering at the yarn-winding station - £1 per skein, proceeds went to the Teapot Trust, a charity providing art therapy to chronically ill children. Everybody wins!

Browsing the Wollmeise stall was certainly an experience.



So much colour! Gaaah! I stopped there first just because of the location, and I almost didn't leave... I'm excited to knit with the yarn I bought since it's beautiful and feels so different from other merino yarns I've tried. It's very sturdy and tightly-spun. We'll see how it knits up.

Plan: buy a gradient set.
Result: a cake of merino/silk laceweight from Bilum



This is Pukpuk by Bilum, a Hungarian yarn company I'd never heard of. They had lots of gorgeous gradients, as well as solids available. I'm not sure what this will become, but I've had a running list of gradient-suitable shawl patterns, so will look to that first. I don't often knit with laceweight, but I have enjoyed doing so in the past.

Verdict: it's a miracle! I pretty much stuck to my plans, even if I did go over my suggested budget by a little. I didn't come home with any single skeins of sock yarn this time, though there was much loveliness to be seen and prodded around the marketplace. Guess I'm satisfied with the loveliness in my house at the moment. Though I'd better get knitting if I want there to be space for more EYF yarn next year...

Stashing UP: this month in yarn acquisition

I've never been on an official stash-down - mostly I am fairly restrained in my yarn purchasing, so I haven't felt the need to stop buying yarn entirely just to bring stash down to manageable size. Yet. The last few weeks have really been an exercise in stashing UP, though.

First, I went to the St Abbs Wool Festival at the beginning of March, in the picturesque seaside village of St Abbs in the Scottish Borders. I had never been to this festival before, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much awesomeness they managed to pack into the two small venues. It was fabulous. Not only was there yarn aplenty, but there were also loads of amazing buttons, weaving, spinning, and felting. It was also a very sunny, gorgeous day - I managed to forget my camera, but I wish I hadn't!

I came away with a skein of Natural Born Dyers BFL/Nylon High Twist Sock. (And some buttons, but button-stashing is for another post).



As the company name suggests, the yarn is dyed with natural dyes. I am always astounded to see the range of great colours people can get using this kind of dye. My photo doesn't do it justice at all, of course. It is a semi-solid with many different shades of green.

Then, I received some yarn as a fabulous birthday present. When I heard that SweetGeorgia was going to be at Unravel, a wool festival in Farnham, I made a special request to my mother-in-law, since I knew she would be attending the festival as an exhibitor. I've drooled over SweetGeorgia yarns on the internet for a long time without committing to purchasing any, and I'd never seen it in person - MIL got me a skein of Cashluxe Fine, which is Merino/Cashmere/Nylon sock yarn. It is quite possibly the softest thing I have ever touched. Amazing! For once, the colour (Wisteria) is pretty accurate in the photo:



As if that weren't enough yarn for a year, never mind a month, I went on a Yarn Crawl this past weekend with my knitting group. Edinburgh has had an explosion of independent yarn shops in the last couple of years, so why not try to visit them all in a day? Sounds like a plan! (I even brought my camera along to document the proceedings, and then got so distracted by the pretties that I didn't take any pictures. Oops.) We ended up visiting four shops, missing out the two department stores that have yarn, and one of the larger shops - otherwise we wouldn't have had enough time. We also feasted on delicious Malaysian food, ate gelato outside in the cold wind, and ended up in a pub. (As you do.) But! As may be expected, yarn came home with me.

Our first yarn stop was Be Inspired Fibres, a beautiful shop that opened last summer. Shamefully, I hadn't been to visit yet - however, I'm sure I will be back frequently. Despite vocally vowing to stick to my plan for the day, which was to buy yarn for a sweater and not random skeins of pretty sock yarn, I failed at the first shop. Some Malabrigo Sock called to me and I could not leave without it.


The colourway is Aguas - watery blue-gray-greens that are more complex than pictured. (Truly, it is very different than the Natural Born Dyers' skein pictured above, even if the photos deny it.) This may seem like blasphemy, but I've never worked with Malabrigo Sock before. It's obviously incredibly soft, but it seems more substantial than I was expecting, given Malabrigo's reputation for buttered-kitten-softness. (This substantialness is a very good thing, in my books.) Anyway. There is no way I am making socks out of something this soft and pretty, but more on that another time.

I didn't buy anything at the next two stops (K1 Yarns, and Kathy's Knits), although Kathy's Knits in particular is a favourite destination of mine for sweater yarn.

Then at our final stop, I finally got my sweater quantity that I had planned on:



Five skeins of Brigantia Luxury Double Knit, from Ginger Twist Studio, a shop that despite its small physical size manages to stock a huge range of fascinating yarns. (All of us on the yarn crawl fit in at once, but just barely!) I have never used this yarn before, but the colours are fantastic, and it feels sturdy enough for my sweater-knitting needs, so I have high hopes for it.

Phew. It has been a while since I acquired so much yarn in such a short period of time, and it's a bit overwhelming! I'm excited about all these things, and some of them I have immediate plans for, so they won't linger in the stash for too long. Still, these acquisitions have made me realise that a good portion of my stash is just stash without any plans attached. I might need to remedy that soon.