July brought plenty of excitement…we bought kayaks and took a family vacation in the lovely Wisconsin Northwoods.  The excitement didn’t stop when we returned home…..a new yarn AND a new fiber were ready to greet me, begging for color.

My inspiration this month is a childhood memory.  Generally considered a weed, my parents did allow one mulberry tree to grow in the fence row of our farm.  It provided a bit of shade for the sheep, and was just the right size and shape for a little girl to climb in.  I spent many summer days in that tree, contemplating life and staining my hands red and purple from the juice of the fruit.

I’m very excited to announce the triumphant return of Tiger Twist.  Not just a return, but an improvement….now the yarn is completely American.  The sheep live here, the superwash treatment is done in the US, and the yarn is spun in an American mill.  I am proud to offer this tight twist two ply, perfect for socks and more.

Naturally, I needed to do a striping yarn for this debut.  Our Mulberry Twist has a pattern of about 8 rows dark burgundy, four rows red, four rows pink, and 8 rows medium burgundy, then the pattern reverses.

I’m always excited when I find new wool, I want to try them all! This month is Gotland, straight from Sweden. It’s a courser wool with a nice wave to it and a long staple…about 6 inches. Gotland is very wearable, however. Just spin it worsted style to capture the ends, and be sure to keep your hands far apart if you have trouble drafting. A special breed of Gotland was used to make the elven cloaks for the Lord of the Rings movies. The natural grey color made a perfect background for the reds and burgundies of Mulberry.

Are you interested in receiving a lovely surprise every month?  There are several spots open in Tiger Club.  You can try it for a little as a month, and may stay as long as you like.   We’d love to have you!

Summer hit, and well….as usual I’m expecting to relax.  Instead, it’s a new kind of hectic, and even though they are fun activities, it takes a toll on the schedule.  So, please accept my apologies for not getting the May reveal of Club done….until now!

May Flowers is a take on this beautiful mountain scenery. Purple, blue, peach, red, white, pink, gold, and green are splashed in short color segments for more blending.

Our yarn is Bengal, a smooth 4 ply of Blue Faced Leicester yarn.

The fiber is Falkland, a versatile favorite that shows off color brilliantly.

For June, I stuck with nature (can’t go wrong!). I wanted something summery, so to the beach we went with Conch Shell…..shades of sand and coral.

Our fiber is Hemp sliver, a bit of a different challenge! Crunch it up and loosen it, then spin like flax. Do a quick YouTube search, I know there are a couple of videos.

And finally, our yarn is Panda, a blend of superwash merino, rayon of bamboo, and nylon. The bamboo makes a wonderful shine to bring out the pearly qualities of our subject.

Thanks for bearing with me! July club will continue with our summery nature theme, and I will have a new yarn and new fiber. The clubs are full for this month, but we will open for new subscriptions on August 1.

‘Tis the season for showers, and upon closer inspection there is a lot of beauty and color in storm clouds. Look at these shades of teal, blue, navy, purple, all toned with brooding gray and black….

With all that inspiration, it was time to head to the dyepots. Only a totally random kettle dye would do, which is such a fun way to dye.  I layered the blues and purple on randomly, then overdyed with shades of grey and black.

The yarn is a brand new one for TPT, a luxury 4 ply yarn of 80% Superwash Merino and 20% Tussah Silk. It is twisted enough to make a great sock yarn, and silky enough to make a great shawl yarn. I love it and the kettle dyeing, and I’m hatching a plan to bring both to the shop.

For fiber….well, we needed something soft as a cloud.

I think this delivers…. 50% fine micron Huacaya Alpaca, 30% Merino, and 20% Silk. Due to the different fiber lengths, I highly suggest spinning this from the fold. It’ll be a great yarn to try spinning with beads to make some sparkly rain drops.

April was our largest club yet, and I plan to hold at about this level through the summer. There is one spot open in the sock club for May, then we are full. If you’d like to be on the wait list, use the contact form in the shop, and if a spot opens I’ll let you know.

I love rainbows.  All. The. Colors.  I’ve had an idea rattling around about making a new rainbow….one that embraces all the lovely transition areas between the main colors.  So I took Tropical Rainbow, and mixed each of the colors half and half with their neighbors.  Tertiary is the result of that experiment……a new rainbow of red-orange, orange-yellow, yellow-green, green-blue, blue-violet, and violet-red.

The fiber is lovely Romney Roving, an all USA product…grown by Michigan Sheep and small mill processed. It is such a fun fiber to spin. Let the twist into the drafting zone to produce an airier, more matte yarn; or smooth as you go for a shinier worsted style. You can’t go wrong.

We were due for some stripes in the Sock Club, and this color was fantastic for it. In the sample, each color stripes about 8 rows on a 64 stitch tube.  The yarn is Safari, a blend of Corriedale wool and Nylon.

Barbara Johnson has designed a sock pattern based on this size of stripe, you can download it from Ravelry for free.  (Shown on Journey.   Safari is a slightly thicker yarn, so you may need to adjust the pattern.)

Another pattern idea is Entrelac. Check out this scarf by IowaKnitter.

Today is the last day to sign up to receive April’s Tiger Club. We’ll be exploring the weather a bit with this one, plus it is a new fiber blend AND a new sock yarn.

This has been the winter of my discontent. Well, ok, not really. But it has droned on and on and on. Color to the rescue! Enter a favorite flashy flower of mine, the Hibiscus.

I love the way the yellow goes into the orange and then the pink, hovering in shades of coral. To make this happen in wool, I needed for my dye colors to ‘break’. This happens when you blend a couple colors of dye, but they attach to the fiber at different times, so you get a lot of variation where one color stuck more in one spot, and more of the other over there. The best candidate for this is always Superwash, as the conditions don’t need to be as extreme to make breaking happen.

Our wool is Superwash Corriedale, which I surprised myself by liking a lot (I have a love-hate relationship with Superwash Merino. Corrie is much easier to handle).  Anyway, I decided to dye this in a gradient, which is my favorite for designing a yarn, as you can do so many things. Spin it straight and chain (or split and ply), make a fractal, pull it all to bits and grab them randomly, use it to load your blending board for striped rolags….seriously, there is so much you can do, and I’m excited to see what you club members come up with!

The yarn is Tiger Twist II, and I went back to a dyeing technique that I haven’t used for a fair while, and is frankly a lot of fun. These are dipped in the round, which gives me really great transitions between the colors. The yarn will make a mini-stripe spiral up around a sock, or you could try your hand at planned-pooling in the round.

Are you missing the fun? Join us for March, the color’s fine!

You must remember this….

A kiss is still a kiss….A sigh is still a sigh….

The fundamental things apply, As time goes by.

Feeling romantic and nostalgic, I cooked up this sentimental colorway…..imagine opening a box in the attic filled with yellowing love letters and dried roses.  Both yarn and fiber were dyed in a fashion I call ‘controlled chaos’, which results in shorter color bursts that appear semi-randomly.  The yarn is Bengal, a nice smooth BFL sock yarn.  The wool is mixed BFL, about 75% white and 25% natural brown.  Those chocolate ribbons add a special depth to the colors.

February Tiger Club is open through the 15th, we would love to have you join us.  It is pay-as-you-go, so you are welcome to try it for as little as one month, or stay as long as you like.  Details are on the Tiger Club page of the shop.