Sophie (@sophie.kamalaine on Instagram)is a fiber friend. She is passionate about yarn, wool, their origin, how they are processed, natural dyeing. One day, she decided to go for it.
Last Fall, she came to a yarn festival where I had a booth and she handed me 2 skeins of HER yarn, offering me to create a pattern with it… I couldn’t resist !
Sophie’s yarn, Kamalaine KL16 Fine, is the first yarn she made (she has other ones too, now). She collected multiple various fleeces from the North-East of France : Bleu du Maine, Clun Forest, Ouessant, Shetland, Solognots, Charollais et Suffolk, and had them blended with a hint of linen (just because…).
The fleeces were washed, carded and woven in France and Sophie is dyeing them herself, in her kitchen, with natural pigments.
The yarn resulting is rustic and a bit dry to work with : it’s not cashemire nor merinos. BUT it blooms beautifully and soften once washed. I find it perfect for fair-isle projects !
I loved working with it and I am already planning other projects !
On the first touch, the yarn felt very rustic and I couldn’t picture myself wearing it next to skin (but that’s only my feelings). Actually, after washing it, it is softer, not butter-soft, but a nice dry soft).
After a while, I decided to create a kind of shoulder-warmer shrug, between a cowl (but covering the shoulder and not the neck) and a cape (but shorter, and leaving the arms free to move). The idea was to have a nice little project perfect for hugging my shoulders and warding off the chill of those cool spring days.
I wanted something simple in form : a circular knit, with very few decreases rounds to form the yoke and some short rows to raise the neckline on the back, but with a lovely fair-isle pattern at the bottom. Indeed, when I first got the skeins in my hands, they screamed at me they wanted to be turned into fair-isle and I diligently obliged !
I was first imaginating a complex fair-isle pattern, which would follow the evolution of floral buds to blooming flowers, but I couldn’t make it work… So I drew a more simple graphic floral pattern a,d I love it.
To finish this project, I couldn’t pass on using one of my very own raku buttons to mark the fold at the collar…
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