Duplicate Stitch Tutorial, New Knit Along - Kate Davies! - Fleece & Harmony Knitting Podcast - Ep 75

[Music] hi to everyone it's kim from fleece in harmony and welcome to the fleece and harmony knitting podcast we're shooting this in the shop in our woolen mill in belfast prince edward island and i would like to welcome everybody that's been joining us for well more than two years now i guess and uh or if you're new welcome and we're so happy that you found us so today we've got quite a big day to go over a lot of things so what we're going to do is we'll just give a little farm update like we always do then we're going to move right into the progress of my projects one of which i'm wearing even though it's still technically a whip not a finished object so i'll explain about that in a few minutes and we are going to do two tutorials today one on duplicate stitch because i am using duplicate switch stitch to finish this sweater and the other one is on a sloped bind off for a sleeve cap which i'm going to show you on my paisley project because we're i'm doing that on paisley as well before we get started with the knitting though we will give a firm update as we usually do so this week's adventure in the weather was that we actually had to have our furnace on it came on two days in a row it was cold enough that it was the furnace came on automatically even though we had it turned down to the low setting because it was summertime and then um today we have the most beautiful beautiful summer day that you could ever imagine with a nice little breeze and the temperature is beautiful and we are having sun and rain which is great for most farmers because the crops all like the rain some farmers are behind because of the amount of rain we had earlier in the spring so they they still um they don't they want rain but they don't want too much rain what it means for us is that our grass is growing like crazy so the sheep actually can't even keep up with it and i talked a little bit about this in the last podcast is that we haven't had an issue like that since uh well for more than three years so it's really um it's really a bit of unusual weather but it's not bad it's not as bad as not having any food for your sheep so it's uh it's manageable for sure and we just have to recognize the people in the western part of canada are just came through a horrific heat wave so you know the weather is all over the map in canada here we're lucky it's uh we weren't complaining about the cold really because we were looking at our friends in the west that were just suffering with the heat and and wildfires and everything so our hearts are are with you and uh we hope that you're uh able to get through all of that uh without too much damage although we know in some places it's been really very devastating so our hearts and prayers are are with you there so in on our farm though we we have pleasant day today the sheep are outside grazing really kind of low maintenance at this point because we don't have to we don't have to haul hay to them and uh really a luxury for us in the last few years because we've been suffering with drought by this time drought for here not like a desert-type drought and now this year we it's kind of like a little bit ease on easy street but we have some pastures that the the grass is literally almost to our waist so that's that's a little bit too much good thing we're going to have a cut to keep on top of it because it's not good for it to overgrow either so that's about it for the farm update no new residents taking up making at home in any of the buildings just the same old old crew haven't seen the skunk in a week or so so i'm sure she's around but she's only coming out at night i guess so i forgot to say at the beginning that this is actually episode 75 and if you're watching it on the first day that we released it it's july 9th we recruit record on the tuesday and we release the videos on the friday so july 9th would be when you're watching it and um i will move right into the whips and rips there's no rips thankfully but we do have unfinished objects still even though i'm wearing one which is my madeleine sweater which is a design in the last row and magazine designed by galena carroll and this was part of the their nostalgia collection and i'm sitting a little bit closer to the camera this time because i did get some comments that people wanted me to be closer to the camera so when i'm showing things that you can see it better but it means that you can't see the beautiful detail on the bottom of the sweater so i'm going to carefully hold it up and see if we can show you the detail on the bottom here i'm just going gonna i'll take pictures and show those as well when it's finished but um you see that you have this beautiful color work and these lines that are coming up from the color work those lines are actually not done with two-handed knitting or color work they're actually done with duplicate stitch so i'm going to show you how i did those on the sweater but i'm also going to show you a tutorial on a yarn that's a little bit easier for you to see the detail of what i'm what i'm doing so we'll um we'll skip to that uh in a little while but right now i'm just going to explain a little bit about the modifications that i made to the sweater so the sweater design as it was designed has a boat neck so in fact you just you just bind off along the top of the shoulder and then you leave an opening with the ribbing straight across the the neckline and i didn't want to do that because i have a fairly short neck and to have a line coming right across the at on top of my collarbone is not really the most flattering look for me so what i did instead was i just made a little bit of a crew neck it's a little bit wider than a traditional crew neck because that's the kind of style that i that i like around my neck so that's a modification in the original pattern as well there is a button that you make that goes right at the top of the um at the top of the the neckline and you do uh you make it in the contrasting color so this sweater is knit in kid silk case held double the two colors are bark for the brown and the peachy pinky shade is called nectar and you knit from the bottom up in pieces so the kind of a traditional sweater construction you may have noticed as i've been putting my arms up that there's no none of these little lines on the sleeves because in fact it's not finished yet i didn't have time to finish all of the duplicate stitch and i wanted to save some of it to do live on a tutorial so that i could share with you how i how i did that and i even the cheat goes even a little bit further because there's a couple lines that still need to be done on the back but the front the front is done so there were some questions about in my mind about the bottom hem because the ribbing on the bottom on the sleeves it's the same thing is very short it's only three rows of ribbing including the cast on and i was worried with the stockinette that it would curl up but you to finish the sweater you you press it the instructions are to steam it um so you're not really pressing it but you're steaming it and then when once i sewed the side sleeve seams the rolling went flat so i don't need to worry about about that that was a concern of mine but no need to worry they know what they're doing at rowan and it does lay flat so we're all we're all good there i think i may actually blot wet block it though even though the instructions don't say that you need to do that because my color work on the bottom is just ever so tight just a little bit more tight than than the stockinette and i think if i just gave that a little bit of a wet block that it would be um it would be even better so i'm gonna i'm going to do that so what's left to do is i have to finish doing i call them icicles but actually they're they're going upwards but i have to finish those on the sleeve and i have three or four of them to do on the back so i'm going to finish that within the next week or so that's madeline by galena carroll it was a really fun project um knitting with two strands of kid silk haze is um it's surprising how thick the fabric is i should say as well the sleeves are bracelet length so um they're not too short this is where they're supposed to be normally i would knit them full length but i did did leave them at bracelet length in fact i could have gone even a little bit shorter i think but i'm i'm happy with uh with the look of it that's part of the style of the sweater as well so this has been really great so i think that what we'll do now is we're just going to pop over to the tutorial and i'm going to show in the tutorial what i'm going to show is um i'll do a couple of the lines or one or two of the lines on this with this sweater but then i'll switch to a yarn which is just a plain yarn with not a lot of fuzz on it so that you can see the duplicate stitch the technique to doing it a little bit easier so we'll pop on over to that tutorial and i'll meet you back here in a few minutes this tutorial is about duplicate stitch so on my madeline sweater i had to do duplicate stitch on these little this little detail that goes goes up i call it calling them icicles but they're going up instead of down but this little detail because you don't want to carry the yarn behind this light colored yarn on top on the top the main nectar color so the pattern suggests that you do dip duplicate stitch for these um these spiky things and that's the right thing to do but you would also do duplicate stitch if you had at want to add a little highlight it could be one stitch every 20 stitches or something like that in a pattern where you don't want to be carrying floats uh for whatever reason because it's not efficient to carry them or because you might see it through behind the fabric so in order to get the duplicate stitch to look really good i'm going to tell you give you a couple hints when i when i do it but i'm not going to do it in mo hair because it's too hard for you to see so we'll just put the modeling away for a minute and i have my trusty swatch this is the hardest working swatch in the world right now because i've done everything with it and i have a contrasting yarn that i'm going to use that's the same weight so this is our air and weight so i have the natural here and i'm going to do the dip duplicate stitch with this raspberry cordial in aaron so let's put my little scissors there my little rabbit scissors and i'm going to you're not um i'm using a blunt tip uh needle but i'm going to talk about the stitches because you need to understand the anatomy of the stitch to have a good understanding of how this this works so you have your v of your stitches which most people would recognize and what you have to pay attention to is that the v the two legs that join at the bottom of the v go into the stitch below together in the same hole the stitch below is wrapped around the back of these two two v's so you can see see that that this loop wraps around the point of the v on top of it so when you're doing your duplicate stitch you actually want to follow the same path that the yarn took when you knit the knit the item so i'm just going to show you this a couple a couple stitches like this and you're going to be able to see so the first thing that you do is you can just um you want to um get your yarn in a position where i usually do this right when i start it's a little bit thick and then i'm i usually just kind of tack it down and you can leave a tail and sew in like a thicker tail if you want but for this demonstration i'm just going to tack it down so you can't see that on the on the other side of the yarn of the project so i'm going to just pop this needle up somewhere okay i'm going to go up here so that i'm on these were my left leaning decreases that i did in the previous tutorial so i'm just going to avoid those because it's not so what i've done now is brought the yarn the contrasting yarn up through the stitch and this is the stitch that i'm going to put the duplicate stitch over so you start at the bottom here and i'm going to give you a lot of detail because there's some helpful hints that it's not merely just following the yarn the way that you actually draw the yarn around the stitch makes a difference on how neat your duplicate stitch looks like so the first thing that i want to do is re replicate this leg the right leg of the stitch so i'm going to go under the toe two legs of the stitch on top being careful not to catch the yarn underneath which is the loop the loop okay so and i'm going to just tighten the tension a little bit in the direction that the yarn would normally go if you do this or you do this or you you know you tighten it in you need to be gentle with this and patient then you can get um make your tension too tight on the sides the sides of the stitch so now that stitch underneath the the raspberry cordial comes here and it goes back down the same hole that i had come up okay so i'm gonna get the yarn kind of in place and then i'm going to so on the underside i'm actually tensioning that stitch in the direction that it would would um go so i'm not going over to the side you see what happens if i pull it to the side i'm going to just loosen that you end up with an uneven stitch so i'm going to tension it in a downward direction and you can see i've replicated the stitch so now i want to do the second stitch i'm coming up inside there okay so i'm right at the point i'm gonna go under the two legs of the stitch above the one that i'm duplicating and i'm pulling in a direction that doesn't put an angle on the yarn and i'm just snugging the tension but not too too aggressively and i'm going right down where i originally came up and i'm going to pull downward not to the side okay now i've got two stitches that are duplicated and it does give you a little bit bigger um a bigger stitch it kind of gives it a little bit of a 3d uh quality but it's pretty pretty good and when once it's been blocked and everything it's not really um super noticeable um on your on your work so i'm just gonna do that again so i'm for the next one up i'm coming up at the bottom of the v's making sure that the angle oh it's a little this is a little thick because the yarn is too aaron straight off there we go coming up and i'm pulling downward not out to the side going under you can see actually then when i'm duplicating this is the strand right in here i'm just gonna actually show that a little bit more if i pull these apart you see the little strand there and i'm just that i've picked that strand okay i'm tensioning to the side and i usually i work it a little bit with my finger just to make sure that it's in a good position and i'm coming down in the hole that i had originally come up in and when i get close i'm tensioning downwards pulling the stitch downwards okay so i'm going to just do a couple more up in the center where the the point of the v is tensioning down across tensioning across and back in the same hole that i had originally come up and as i get close to the tensioning part i'm going to tension in a downward direction so that you can see that this is all uh it's all pretty even so this one is a little bit bigger and you can actually go back and um play a little bit with the with the tension under here to tighten that up a little bit if you if you're if it bothers you um you can figure out how it goes this one goes under here so you can just uh tension that a little bit more all right so there's um now when you're counting how many you've done it's kind of because these end up being quite close together it sometimes can be hard there's four obviously but i often look here at the next stitch beside the row that i'm that i'm doing so it's actually one two three four it's easier almost to see it in the in the original stitches than the the ones that you're the ones that you're doing so that's how you do duplicate stitch you can move over rows so you would just come up on the next row and you just do the same thing under the stitch the two legs of the stitch on top of the one you're duplicating and back down oh i went to the side so you see what happened it skewed the stitch a little bit so i'm just gonna re-tension okay and then you can continue doing the same thing up i find it's easier to um or i always do it going up the row um i'm sure that there's a way to do do it in the opposite direction but i find that this gives me the neatest look so if i actually had to go unless i was making a whole line across i would probably do find my path so that i had a way to do all of the stitches up in a row first and then i might even break the yarn and um break the yarn and start another another row if i had to go side by side okay so that's duplicate stitch um and i hope you find that helpful thanks okay so we're back so i hope that you found that helpful and um we i use duplicate stitch i don't use it that often but when i do use it it is it's really a good thing to know how to do because it really saves you a lot of like carrying floats over long long spaces or um doing fiddly color color work where you have one stitch maybe that you need a contrasting color in you know something that's mostly two colors it's it's really good if you have a third color that you just want to insert for some accent um i've used it in this obviously because of the long spaces between the the tall um spikes that are that are coming there and we've also used it in um doing christmas balls like the ernie and carlos christmas balls where there's one or two little highlights that you just you want to do a stitch or two and it's also been used on the moose cap hat from saltwater classics because we wanted to jazz up the pattern a little bit and make one of the mousse red so you can see here how we how we use the duplicate stitch to do that otherwise we would have had to do intarsia and it was actually easier just to do the duplicate stitch so there's all kinds of applications on how to use that once you have it in your head about how how to do it and what kind of applications so we're going to use duplicate stitch in something that we're going to show in the next podcast actually which is a pattern called the puffin hat and that was designed by carla wolfe and she used our selkirk worsted yarn to do that hat you use duplicate stitch to do the detail on the beak of the the puffin so you can see in the picture that there's a little tiny bit of orangey and red in it that it didn't make sense to do full color work on on that amount of uh detail you use duplicate stitch and it's perfect it's the the right way to to do that so that will be we'll be showing that in more detail in the next podcast um we're just having a test knit for the shop and then once we get that done then we will make kits for it for that hat actually because you just need a tiny bit of yarn to do those extra details so you can stay tuned for that for uh for next uh next podcast so the next project that i was working on is paisley you've seen this if you've been watching us regularly you've seen me show this project a lot for those that may have been just joining us i just want to show you the body is done so just to review the construction you have it's knit in the round seat two hand i'm using two-handed color work on this there's also sticks in the sleeves so the sleeves are steeped i haven't cut anything yet because i'm just working on the sleeves and i am just finishing the sleeve cap of the first sleeve and in the last episode i was a little bit concerned that perhaps the um the amount of increases that i had to do on the sleeve to get to the amount of stitches that i needed on the sleeve cap i was worried that the sleeve was going to be too long if i followed exactly the instructions with the distance between the increases on on the sleeve so i measured really carefully and as i said in the last podcast uh it was really going to be very close if it was going to if it was going to work or not and i asked for some suggestions about what to do if i felt that the sleeve was going to be too long in order for me to fit in all the increases and we got some i got some great suggestions from you guys in the comments so thank you very much for that uh as it turns on out i kept measuring every time i did an increase i measured again just to make sure like where the sleeve was going to come and as it turns out i was able to do all of the increases as prescribed by the pattern and then i just was i did two more rounds of knitting straight or flat just to um to finish it off to give a little bit of room between the last decrease and the edge so and it's just exactly the right length so you knit uh in the round until you get to where you start the um the decreases for the sleeve cap and then you start working flat so right now i'm flat new doing flat knitting on my i'm still using my 12 inch chiago needles and doing flat and i'm getting close to finishing i have like a i don't know maybe 12 more rows to go or so i wanted to show you one detail here and i'll take a picture of this so up close is that the pattern asks you to decrease two stitches at the beginning of every row when you start doing the the um really deep decreases to make this slant and of course that gives you that stair step look as traditional decreases do so i started to do that decreasing binding off two stitches at the beginning of every row and i have my stair steps starting here to show you a picture and then i decided or i remembered that there is a way to do a sloped decrease which gives you a nice smooth line like this so i didn't bother ripping back because i do have one um jagged one here where i decreased two stitches and then i started to do the sloping this will just go into the steam so i didn't bother to [Music] to rip back but i started doing the slope decreases and i wanted to show you a tutorial on that because it is really very very simple and it just makes the the look of the sleeve so much more smooth obviously it's perfectly smooth and you can still keep going in pattern and just the sewing up of the sleeve is a lot easier so even though when you have these stair steppy decreases you can sew them in to the to the armhole and they're if you're really good at sewing you can't tell that there's anything going on underneath in the seam with these little bumps however if you're at all um not quite far in far enough when you're doing your seaming then it can make like a little the tiniest little pucker on the sleeve whereas when you do this nice smooth slope decrease you don't get that and i find that as people that have watched for a while know i like sewing and i find it i i'm happy to take some out and then do do it over again if it's not perfect but i find that it's really really difficult to get a perfectly smooth seam when you've got these um little notches basically in your in your sleeve so i'm really happy with the way the slope is going and you can see what it would have looked like you'd have this every uh every couple of well every row it would be stepping all the way up there and it's so simple to do to get the smooth one so i'm gonna that tutorial you should find that really really helpful so the first sleeve is almost done the length is perfect the pattern has shows the sleeve coming just down here to the thick part of your thumb and that's exactly where it uh where it lands uh once i opened up my needle like this and was knitting flat i was able just to put the whole thing on my um on my arm and it's uh it's just exactly the right length so that's coming along and uh just have the other sleeve to do then i start the cutting on the sticks and um then there's all the embroidery and everything that has to go so there's gonna be more on this as it comes but uh for now the knitting is is going well so then this brings me to what my next project is going to be so last time i talked about the fact that i wanted to do a cal knit along based on kate davey's book 10 years in the making so we've got that pretty well organized so we will talk about that in detail today the next project that i want to do is the even dune pullover which i talked about and i'm just going to show you a picture of that so it's this lovely striped pullover and i have some i have pictures of all of the patterns from this book so i'm going to do a slideshow and we'll show you will show you that and you can see all of the the patterns that kate has designed over the last 10 years and that are being celebrated in this book so we'll take a look at that and then we'll come back and talk about the cow [Music] me [Music] hey [Music] wow so that's quite a legacy so far for 10 years those patterns are i'm sure you've recognized some of them their classics and you know kate is just such a wonderful designer and um i'm really really happy to be knitting out of her this book 10 years in the making and even dude pattern sweater is going to be fantastic so um the cal i for the cal um i think that we're just going to allow everybody to join that wants to indicate davey's pattern so there's lots of books that kate has released so i'm gonna just i picked out a few um that maybe are made maybe not quite as well known as the um the books that are pretty well famous actually like the milaraki heads and the um some of the shetland books that she's done that are really well known um this i picked out a few patterns from some of the books that we've shown i've marked them so that i'm not flipping through everything so the first one i wanted to show is knitting season and this book has as all kate's books have there's lovely writing and context for the patterns there's beautiful beautiful things in a variety of things so the knitting season has this is not knitting season but it's a really really nice book it also has some things in it that are um like cushions and there's a blanket that i'm gonna show you so first pattern that i wanted to show you in here is so i'm still flipping even though i have my is the one that's on the cover and this is actually a dress so i'm going to take this out so you have this beautiful yoked sweater dress and it's just really lovely so this is called uh grease i think that's how you pronounce it and um i think i would make mine a little bit longer but that's what you can knit even even longer but uh the yolk is just spectacular on that the next pattern i wanted to show out of here is this cozy comfy um traditional sweater that's made with quite a thick yarn so it would be something like what we would um use for with our aaron yarn and i am not even going to pronounce the name because i i well i'll try really get pull over i think so anyway it's a it's a lovely one simple raglan design but just classic and and lovely and then the third pattern that i wanted to show from this book is this beautiful beautiful blanket and it's called let uh glasgow flourish and it's just absolutely gorgeous this blanket and it's just um it's based on a coat of arms for uh glasgow city and that was the inspiration for it and it's just lovely it's knitting quite a fine yarn so there's obviously a little bit of work to do on that but it's just a pattern that is just so inspirational so the next book i wanted to feature is inspired by isla and um in this book this is the cover so here um there's a lot of context in this book about uh isla and um there's history and there's they're talking about the landscape and there's all kinds of beautiful beautiful pictures to put the patterns in context and the first pattern i wanted to show out of this is called summer summerlead and it's a beautiful big shawl that you can see has lace work and the iron is not super fine so it's but it's knit on a fairly generous needle size so it's just a lovely piece to to knit and there's a couple garments in here which are really really nice too so i'm gonna show and this gentleman's sweater sometimes don't talk enough about um the guys so look at this it's just beautiful with that little bit of cable detail and across the shoulder and then stuck in that to give you a break after that and the final thing i wanted to show it of this book is called port charlotte again pretty simple it's the yolk that's uh that's fantastic just so colorful and cheerful we have all of the knitting books that kate has published and we also carry handy woman and um there's a lot of different books so you can check out the website and there's sure to be something for everybody there and pick your project and then you can join the the 10 years in the making knit along that we're going to have so as i mentioned i'm going to uh knit even noon and i will cast that on probably this weekend but not not in time for you to see it here and the colors that i chose are from our selkirk worsted collection so i've used some of the new colors that we did in the gradients so i'm happy that i'm get to knit with some of the new colors and i've mirrored the colors that kate had in her picture i had debated whether to do the one color version of the sweater because she does show the pattern in one color with the neutral stripes uh narrow natural so the natural wool and when i say natural i'm talking about just the wool color a crew or whatever and but then i decided to knit in colors that mirrored what kate did in the color colorful version and the reason why i did that changed my mind was because i had a customer request asking me to match up the colors and when i looked at the selection of colors i said okay i want to knit that too so it's going to be this combination i'm just going to hold these up so these are the five colored stripes and then of course between each of the stripes you have just natural natural white yarn to break break them up so i'm going to show those colors and i'll show them to you one at a time with the name so that you can tell what they have how it's going to look so the the purple is amethyst brooch and as i said it's all in south kirkworth there is autumn birch next then we have sea foam and watermelon which is one of the new new colors watermelon from the red gradient and i'm using lady slipper from the purple or the amethyst gradient to round out the five shades so i'm going to start doing that and it's i'm really excited about it kind of an easier knit and super cheerful and happy and colorful and bright so i'm really excited to do that so for the rest of you that want to join you can knit whatever you want as long as it's kate davies pattern use whatever yarn you want it's fine and um you we have all of the books as i said so if you're if you find a pattern and you want to purchase one of our books you can you can purchase them here we are getting inkling which is her latest book which we haven't don't have in the store yet but it is actually on its way here right now so it should be here early next week because they're usually really really quick shipping so we'll have inkling to add to our collection of all the other kate davies books that we have so the calendar is going to start today on july 9th and we're going to let it run until the last day of november because i suspect that a lot of people are going to want to knit sweaters so they will have time to to knit a sweater we were really really lucky because and feel really honored to be able to um offer prizes for this cow and two of the prizes are coming from kate herself so she's sending us um a knitted piece that will be um will be one of the prizes and she's also sending us a knitting season journal so i won't uh get say the name of the piece the knitted piece yet because uh i don't have it here yes i just want to make sure that i can show it at the same time that that we get it and we're also receiving a prize from chiago so um estelle yarns has sent us a shorty set and this is the blue shorty set so those are the small size blue shorties we call them blue because the the case is blue and that will also be a prize in this knit along so we're really really happy that we have prizes to be able to to give we haven't decided how we're going to choose the prizes yet so we'll give more information on that in the next episode um something some of it will be at least a random draw and maybe we'll do another category or something different for one of one or two of the prizes since we have the the three and uh um which should be really exciting so you have until the end of november uh i'll start a thread on ravelry so that we can go in there and and chat and show our show our progress on our on our knitting and like i said you can use any iron you want because you don't have to buy your yarn here you can use any urine you want and you can knit any of the kate's patterns that you want you just have to have to knit if you knit more than one thing you'll just have more entries in the uh into the prize draw so we'll do the prize draw by the project so you know if you're knitting smaller objects and you want to do more than one then that's fine too also to celebrate uh the kickoff of the the knit along we are offering a 10 discount on yarns if you purchase one of our yarns to do the project and the yarns that are included are the um point prime sock yarn the selkirk wursted and the signature aaron with those three weights of bases you should be able to knit most of the patterns in the books or find something pretty close to be able to knit almost all of the patterns in the book so those spaces kind of cover that and the discount will be applied automatically to your order with an order of 125 and you have those your total order would be 125 and the discount is on the yarns so um that will be effective as soon as this video is released so that will and it will run for two weeks so on um two weeks from today that will be the end of the uh and the end of the discount so if you uh look up look up your patterns figure out what you're going to do what you're going to do if you need help you know with any urine suggestions or whatever just send us a note and we'll be happy to uh to help you choose something to be able to participate in the knit along so 10 years in the making knit along kicks off today so start your needles let's go so that should be really fun and i can hardly wait to see what everybody's what everybody's going to knit there's such a wide variety of things that kate has uh on offer in her her patterns and her books and so forth it should be really really fantastic knit along okay so now we have other things in the shop that we'll talk about and there's a little bit of housekeeping from previous episodes so the hand-knit socks and the hand knit vamps sold very quickly we had lots of requests for the yarn if we wanted to do the three-ply sock yarn i have to make it so we we haven't done that yet but we did have some of the sock yarn the two-ply sock urine that we used to knit the vamps still on cones so i was able to stain those cones and get them ready it only comes in natural black so when one stain will make uh one pair of vamps and just to be clear the vamps are ankle height so this is why you're able to get both uh both vents that have one skein we weighed the vamps and then we gave a little bit of extra yarn so that you could do larger sizes than the ones i was wearing so you should be able to make two vamps to make a pair for most sizes that you would encounter with this one stain of yarn we added a little color stripe on the top of ours but um we're just sending you the black yarn and you can use uh scrap yarn that you still have in your stash just to do that one one line stripe and these are now up on the website so you can head over there and order them in the search menu when you get to the home page of our website if you just put in vamps you will get the yarn the yarn will come up for because i use the word vamps in the name of it and also you'll get a link to the saltwater classics book which is the book that the vamps pattern is in and if you don't have the pattern then you can buy the book and then you can get your get your yarn as well and like i said it's natural black two-ply 100 wool made from the black uh wool from our sheep and our home flock so there's no uh we use wool from other island farmers in our our regular white wall but this black is a hundred percent from uh from our farm so that's one thing we will work on the three-ply sock yarn which is what the longer socks was made out of but we just haven't had a chance to get that that finished yet the other thing that we will talk about today is that we have the final installment of our gradient yarns and this is green this time so we're really really happy that we're we're able to round out our selection of green shades and i'm just gonna put them here so um the shape these shades were um inspired by fur so an existing color that we have which is fur and that goes all the way down to [Music] dune grass which is the lightest green so fur and dune grass were existing shades and then the three that we made to complement those are going from dark to lighter uh trillium which is a really lovely um more pure green i would say and then we have uh sumac which is a tree that grows um everywhere on pei but in particular in the eastern part of pei where we're located and then we have old man's beard so old man's beard is a lichen that grows mostly on spruce trees and it's pretty common around here it looks like a light green shaggy beard and it hangs down off of the trees and when i was researching for names for the colors um it was uh really interesting because this particular lichen has anti-anti-microbial properties and apparently during uh wartime that people would uh use this where if they were wounded and needed something to put on wounds you they used old man's beard as a dressing on wounds so that um because it was anti-microbial but it also because of the texture of it allowed um the the wound to breathe so it was it's pretty amazing that that's that's uh something i had no idea even though i've seen this forever around and then the last one is dune grass so the dunes um the the sand dunes and pei are held together with dune grass and it comes in all different kinds of colors but uh this is just uh the color that we chose which was an existing one so you have those three colors as always those three colors that are new and as always we have all of these shades you can buy them in the kit so the kit that comes with five mini skeins they're 50 yard skeins in the selkirk worsted or you can buy them all individually in full size stains and you have the five colors like this so there you go and just to remind you the other gradients that we have that we're still uh we're going to keep them in stock so we're making we're making more as they sell you have the blue gradient which was the first one and next you have the amethyst gradient then we did the um i think we did the the neutrals the blacks so you have black and gray gradient the last one was red and now we have the green so we've completed a good spectrum of colors and we've come up with some great new colors to add to our our library of shades and we're really happy with the the colors that uh that we were able to add that kind of fit in spaces that where we had little gaps in our selection so we hope that you like them so that's the end of the gradient project and we'll be doing a new project coming up in the next couple episodes or so and as always the people that are subscribed to the newsletter always get first uh first dibs on everything we feature something new in the newsletter first and then um we show it on the podcast the next week so the newsletter people already know about the green gradients and and for viewers that are not subscribed to our newsletter then you'll have a chance to to partake after you see the video the other thing that we worked on in this week in the shop is um we wanted to do a couple more colors in the bell river dk so the bell river dk is a yarn that we make it's a three ply yarn it's 250 yards for 100 grams so it's a little bit finer than um our regular um aaron it's it's kind of like um it's well it's a dk dk weight and a little bit finer than the um the worsted as well it has a really really lovely texture because it's 50 alpaca and 50 wool and we did um three colors uh the last time i thought we made it uh that we dyed some of it but we also had some naturals so i've got natural black in the bell river dk and we have quite a lot of that and again all of the black wool that was put in the bell river dk comes from our home flock so there's no other wool from any other flock on pei in in that black the alpaca was purchased from green gable alpaca so that's where we have the uh where the alpaca comes from so 50 wool 50 alpaca the existing shades that we did were bramble i'm just gonna so we had kind of a theme going here so we had bramble and then we did a vineyard that matched bramble and we did amethyst brooch and we still have a little bit left of this but not that much so if you get on there you see something you like so these three colors all go together so i'll just show them together so yet hopefully the light is good enough that you can see how they they complement each other we have a little bit of that left and then i decided i wanted to do something that was a little bit brighter and um a little bit lighter and brighter so i've done two new colors so there's a hat and i had some of the uh the blended yarn that was um white so we used white wool with the out white alpaca or a very light life on and i dyed up rhubarb so we have rhubarb now to brighten up the selection and then i just felt like i wanted to have some blue so and i had more of the white left so we did this and we're calling this hydrangea so this beautiful blue yarn is just gorgeous it's really got a tonal quality to it it wasn't um it's not really you can't it's not variegated because it's all one color but it definitely has that shading and tonal quality um that i did on this just to give it a little bit extra interest so those bell river um shades are all up on the shop and you can go over there and and place your order for those and um i have one other little thing that i wanted to show in the the shop update which is new i haven't showed before for sale and it's this little book so you might remember that i did a test knit for um joanne who's a customer here and she as a thank you um gift for doing the test knitting for her little christmas ornament that it's the pattern that she'll be launching she gave us gave the test knitters this beautiful book so it's a hand completely handmade and it's a little knitting journal and you have that little tie and then inside you have um a little pocket to talk about your project and there's just a little card or two cards in there you have tabs where you can write your notes about your project and you can see them here and all the papers are all slightly different and you can take notes it's just it's lovely and it's so amazing that it's handmade and then in the back you have a little envelope like a little folder that you could use to fold your pattern up and put it in there if it's if it's small enough on one sheet would fit in in that little pocket and it's a beautiful hardcover book it's bound bound with a type book binding thread i guess inside and all of the books just slip in there so if you purchase the book and then you use all the pages or if you're worried that you've used all the pages joanne actually has extra pages available so you can buy it by another little booklet to add to the cover if you want it to to replenish some of the pages there so we've got a few of these because i can't imagine how long it takes to make them but we've got a few of them that we're going to put up on the the website and you just have this lovely little tie uh to close keep the book closed so you can purchase these through us and um help support another local artist that's making something that's really really beautiful and completely handmade okay so i think that's it for the new products in the shop um i am happy to say that we did receive our order of the ultimate sweater book by amy herzog so those sold out really really quickly so we have them back in stock now so we have those and we also got a small replenishment of the knitting magic book by the harry potter book um knitting harry potter book so we have that and we have one more book coming in this book was a special order but we had a request from for it i've had this in my library for quite a long time it's called the magic of shetland lace knitting and so it is a stitch dictionary for uh lace patterns it's really really a very useful book if you like to knit lace and i'm just gonna flip through so you can see that there's lots of um lots of different patterns in there and it goes over the structure of making a shetland lace shawl so there's really like step by steps instructions about how do you pick your patterns how you you know what you do for the border to pick the border versus the center of the of the shawl and uh like i said it gives you tips on how to do the math to calculate what kind of patterns you should be choosing so this is coming in it's on its way to us um but uh it should be here next week but if it might be a little bit longer but um we did order some copies of that so that's also new to the shop so i think um i think that's it and um the in the middle part today is going to be a kind of a rewind run because when we first started doing the uh podcast we were we did went through every process that we do in the mill to make the yarn and we had the machines running and then there was a voice over talking uh over what we were doing so we started right from the beginning of cleaning the fleece and just because of the timing of when we started filming we uh are recording those those segments we did the shearing at the end because we started in the middle of winter for the the other sections so i'm going to follow that same same pattern so even though the processing of the wool really starts with the shearing that will be the last one that we'll show but we start with cleaning the fiber and you know how that's done because we've talked about it but this is a little bit more in depth about what we do to clean the with the fiber and you can see this series in each of the steps you actually see the machines working and the people that are doing the work uh what their how they're doing it so the first one is um skirting the fleece so we will show that here it used to be called uh welcome to our world but since we started the in the mill section we'll just uh we're going to rebrand it to in the mill and without further ado we'll go back in time and back into the mill and you can look at cleaning the fleeces all right so when we skirt a fleece we take it out of the bag it came in or wherever we have it stored and put it on this table which we call a skirting table you'll notice it's covered in a mesh that has a very fairly wide or large holes in it and that's to allow any loose vegetation or short fibers to fall through on their own some short fibers are just short coming off the sheep but some are created by something called second cuts that's when the shearer goes over the same area twice so they've already taken a pass and taken off most of the fiber but then if they go back over the same section of the sheep and take a bit a cut sorry closer to the skin it creates what's known as a second cut and those are generally too short to spin so we do want them to just fall out through the table without us having to look for them the other things we're looking for particularly where most of our fiber comes from are burs and timothy heads so if you miss a burr or a timothy head it will go through the carter and then the seeds that are in those pods will be distributed evenly throughout the entire batch of yarn which means when you take it home to knit with it you're gonna find them because there's absolutely no way for us to remove those later on in the process if we don't remove them now and now once ken is done shaking everything loose and checking to make sure there's no damp areas or anything it just goes back in a bin until he's ready to soak and then wash it we'll cover that as the next installment in welcome to our world and that's where we get off all the dirt and lanolin that's still left on the fleece after skirting okay so i hope that you enjoyed this episode if you did like it don't forget to give us the thumbs up and um as always we just love looking at the comments so if you want to leave a comment any suggestions and we're more than happy to to read those we in fact it's it's a joy to read the comments i just want to thank everybody for your support it's been really really great and if you don't want to miss anything any videos or any new podcasts then hit your notifications button and you click on that little bell and then you'll get a notification when we release a new video we'll now go to the harmony part which has been a regular little resp at the end of the video and um i'm not even sure what it is this time there's a couple choices so i'm going to choose something so i hope that you have a great two weeks thank you for joining me again and we'll see you back here in two weeks time i hope and in the meantime enjoy the harmony part thanks bye [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Fleece & Harmony

Views: 7,337

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Id: gv8LFo62oaQ

Length: 67min 4sec (4024 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021