Another good-bye to Classic Elite Liberty Wool

All of Classic Elite yarn is discontinued now that the company has folded. I’ve already discussed how much I wish it were not so. I’ve been working through some of my stash of Classic Elite recently, including their workhorse superwash worsted, Liberty Wool. It is, or was I guess, surprising yarn. It could even be a challenge to be sure you got the same colorway when buying multiple variegated balls for a project because, depending on where in the sequence the skein was wound, the balls would look quite different.

These four balls of Colorway 7581 wouldn’t have been my first choice in colors. But choices are very limited these days, if you do happen to find some still available. And 60% off made me more accepting of that St. Patrick’s Day green with the browns.

7581 turned into Molly, by Susan Mills Knits. A friend remarked that this Molly will go with any color coat. True. And folks will see you coming!

Molly’s a big fav of mine. Check out others I’ve knit here and here.

I won’t spill the beans in case you decide to knit Molly. But prepare yourself for a FOUR row pattern. Yep. Four rows, over and over and over. The scarf is reversible. But each side of the ruffle is different. And the sides are flipped along the ribbed spine of the scarf.  There are hints on Ravelry about how to read your knitting on this pattern and most of them involve marking right sides or wrong sides. That didn’t do anything for me. The “trick” to keeping your place in this pattern, which consists of two repeated rows followed by another two repeated rows, is to remember: if the ruffle you’re looking at has 2 ridges, work a row 1. If the ruffle you’re looking at has 4 ridges, work a row 2. And don’t forget that rows 2 and 3  aren’t done until you work across the entire width of the scarf. I know that won’t make any sense until you purchase the pattern and give it a try, but it really does tame Molly’s short rows.

I also still had 2 balls remaining of Colorway 7824, acquired in the same 60% off sale as my Molly yarn.

This colorway interested me more, at least from what I could see on the outside of the balls. Everyone who’s a color persnicketee buying this yarn knows to gently poke around in the center of the ball to see what colors are hiding within. Honestly, I didn’t much care. Let it be a surprise.

And it was:

How’d all that blue and green hide out in that center? I think it livens up the skein quite remarkably.

These mittens are another Susan Mills Knits pattern: Mitered Mittens. They are knit in one piece beginning with the cuff. The seams are sewn along the outside of the hand and around the pointed top and on the inside of the thumb. Either mitten fits either hand because the thumb gusset is worked on the side.

The large size is a perfect fit for me. And if the random variegated Liberty Wool doesn’t strike your fancy, try a self-striping worsted. I didn’t have any in my stash, but some of the striped versions of this mitten look great.

2-color slip stitch hats

Kelbourne Woolens is releasing a free hat pattern each month in 2019 as part of their Year of Hats series. They’ve gathered a good group of designers. Each hat is designed for worsted weight Germantown. Good old  Germantown. I used to buy it at my local “dime” store. I’m pleased that Kelbourne rescued that workhorse. Month-by-month, these freebies are available on Ravelry. A number of the patterns are standouts, this one included.

This is the June Hat, designed by Meghan Kelly.

You have to be willing to purl in the round, but that never troubles me. The basic technique is that you switch the yarn color each round, and the lines of raised stitches are created by slipping a stitch of the contrast color (at controlled intervals) in one round and knitting that stitch in the next round. Very clever.

The pattern doesn’t mention it, but it will be known by any except an absolute newbie, that you have to move the yarn to the nonpublic side of the work before and after slipping the stitch.

The pinwheel crown decreases are totally clever!

My June Hat is knit in a new-to-me yarn: Denim by Nako. Denim is 60% cotton, 40% acrylic. It reminds me some of Berroco Comfort, both in its feel and its handling. It’s very soft and would make excellent hats for the itch adverse or for chemo caps. I worked with my lacepoint needles because, like Comfort, for me the yarn was a bit splitty. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I was quite taken with the yarn, and with the slip stitch technique, so I looked for another pattern using slip stitches.  I’ve had Marina Hayes’s “Prepared for Vancouver?” hat in my queue since sometime around the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Some may have purchased the pattern through Knit Picks, where it went by the name Blue Ridge Hat. Vancouver uses stockinette as the slip stitch basis.

Here’s another view.

Vancouver alternates colors every 2 rounds. The raised lines of slipped stitches are formed by slipping a stitch in the first round and knitting that same stitch in the second round. Honestly, I find the result quite remarkable. It doesn’t seem like such a technique would end up looking like this.

And, again, the crown decreases work out well.

A new yarn and, for me, a hat-building technique I’ve not used much before. Great fun!

A sad knitting story

I attended a knitting retreat in late 2018 and was totally gobsmacked by the beautiful colors of Sun Valley Fibers MCN Fingering weight. Such depth of color. Such choice of colors. This is what I purchased, influenced by the sample of Melanie Berg’s On the Spice Market that the booth showed in exactly these colors:

That’s surely enough to make any yarnie get the needles clicking.

Berg’s pattern is beautiful. I’d had it in my queue to knit almost from the time it was first released. I’m a big fan of mosaic knitting, which is what that middle section is.

I had a blast knitting this and thought I’d done a good job of working up my Spice Market.

As my favorite 4-year old would say, “Ta da!”

I debated about whether I should wet block the shawl. I often don’t block garter stitch, but it looked to me like the sections of wider color blocks at each end of the shawl could use some evening out. So I put the shawl in cold water to settle into a soak. I returned to the basin within a few minutes to see if the shawl was sinking and saw that vivid red dye had leached into the water. I removed the shawl from the water within 5 minutes of gently starting the soak.

This photo doesn’t quite do justice to how much the antler shade was stained pink. But when your eyeballs  compared the off-white sections on the red end with the off-white sections on the green side, the definitely pink cast was very obvious. And the red leachate looked particularly bad in the narrow strip of off-white between the two reddish blocks near the end of the shawl.

Knowing I might try to remedy this, somehow, I carefully dried the shawl flat–with no application of heat. Not from the furnace heating vent. Not even from the sun.

I consulted the yarn gurus on one of the main Ravelry forums and heard that some have had success removing dye by re-washing the garment using Shout ColorCatcher. This stuff:

The sheets are meant to be placed in the washing machine to catch color.

After crying in my diet Coke for a few weeks, I filled my sink basin with cold water, dropped a color catcher in, and then added the shawl. The color catcher sheet almost instantly turned a deep pink, as tons more dye leached out. I quickly removed the shawl, cleared the basin, refilled it with cold water and another sheet. I added the shawl and AGAIN, the basin filled with red and the color catcher was overwhelmed with pink. I used about 20 basins of water and 14 color catcher sheets before I gave up. The sheet (and the water) eventually turned a lighter shade of pink.

Here’s what my Spice Market turned into:

All of the antler shade, the off-white, picked up some dye and turned sort of dull looking.

 

And the red end of my Spice Market? A particularly yucky shade of pinkiness. I’m confident you feel my pain.

I reviewed the yarn on Ravelry and commented on the dye run off in early June. Another knitter, 2 months before me, had the same problem with the same string of shades and her On the Spice Market. There’s no reply from the company on either of our Ravelry reviews. I also private-messaged the company through Ravelry on June 2nd and have yet to receive a reply. Disappointing.

I believe I’ll likely knit another On the Spice Market. It’s a wonderful shawl pattern. I won’t use Sun Valley Fibers MCN fingering though. And color catchers doubtless have some wonderful uses. I can confidently say that they definitely sop up dye. But, for this yarn, not enough and not fast enough. I am not a happy camper. I own two other skeins of this yarn, both in strong colors. I intended to use them together. I’ll not be doing that.

I also recently washed my Crimson Leaves Cowl knit in the same yarn, in Sun Valley Fibers crimson leaves colorway. I washed it in cold water and Euculan. It bled dye like the proverbial stuck pig.