You should be going to Yarnover

Because it's awesome.

And because I said so.

What more incentive do you need?

Yarnover is an annual event put on by the Minnesota Knitter's Guild, and over its long history, it's grown to epic proportions. Held one day a year (April 28th), an entire (large) high school is descended upon by knitters. As if that weren't spectacle enough, there's an amazing marketplace and a roster of nationally known teachers. I hate to name drop, but...

Anne Hanson. Sivia Harding. Clara Parkes. Annie Modesitt. Amy Singer. And a bunch more. (Yes, me too, although I am hardly worth name dropping over.)

Here's the class schedule:

I see about ten classes I want to take, but I'll be teaching all day, so I'll have to wait for another opportunity.

There's a meet and greet dinner the night before at a nearby hotel -- buy a ticket and come hang out with all of us!

Even if you can't make it for the classes, it's totally worth it to stop by for the marketplace -- I like this event because there's a huge variety of things (ahem), but it's also manageable in size. You won't spend two days walking an endless maze of convention center flooring, not knowing where to start.

Here are a couple of pics I grabbed from last year's event:

(Aimee from Darn Knit Anyway, adorable as usual.)

Class registration opens today, and some of the classes are already full from pre-registration, so I would sign up as soon as you can. You can download the full brochure, including all the course descriptions, off the MN Knitter's Guild website, here.

Or I'll make it easy for you and let you download it off of my blog, too: 2012 Color Yarnover Brochure

I don't want to hear any excuses from you. I've given you ample planning time. I've given you sufficient incentive.

You're coming.

Please and thank you.

The end.

tour of exclusive colorways, stop five

Welcome to stop five on our tour of shop exclusive colorways! I drew three beauties out of the coffee mug this morning.

First up is Peacock. Made exclusively for StevenBe/The Yarn Garage in Minneapolis.  I adore this one, and from the sound of things, y'all do too.

Love the teal, love the violet, love the multiple browns, the turquoise, the lime, love them all independently, love them together. Lovelovelove.

And here's an interesting tidbit: I actually dye this in the pattern of peacock feathers, starting with the round indigo eye and working outward in concentric rounded shapes.

Sometimes, despite my proclivity to add certain colors to everything, mother nature knows best. All I can do is imitate.

Want some of this yarn for your own? You can certainly stop by the store, which should be on your bucket list,or you could call/email. We Minnesotans are a friendly bunch. They don't call it Minnesota Nice for nothing. They can be reached at 612-259-7525, or at steven@yarngarage.com.

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Next is a colorway near to my heart, because it's for my hometown LYS, Yarn Harbor. This eponymous (fine, I used to be an English teacher!) colorway has been a hit, in part, because it combines colors that most people feel comfortable wearing and giving: blue, greens, grays, and purples.

Here's a peek at one of my earlier versions of this colorway: it had pops of lime green and rusty brown. In the end we went with the more muted, sophisticated version.

Yarn Harbor is celebrating its anniversary the first weekend in February, and we're making up a fresh batch of this colorway for the event. It would be a great time to stop by! You can also call them at 218-724-6432, or email them at yarnharbor@yahoo.com.

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And last, but not least, we have two coordinating colorways, Through the Looking Glass and Strawberry Fields Forever. (Yes, I like literary and musical references. I used to be an English teacher, OK?)

These two are exclusive to The Loopy Ewe, the venerable online store, and they are absolutely stunning when knit up.

See?

Photo Source

(The pattern is the Samovar Shawl.)

My inspiration for the Through the Looking Glass was this image:

I just loved the pennants on the headboard and the colors in the comforter.

Strawberry Fields Forever is the warm strawberry pink coordinate that is gorgeous on its own or when paired with Through the Looking Glass.

If The Loopy Ewe doesn't have any of these instock, you could email them at support@theloopyewe.com, or give them a call at 1-888-527-9181. They can always order you some from moi!

Did you know we had so many shop exclusives? (And there are more coming!) I didn't realize it until I actually sat down and made a list.

A note on buying from LYSs and web stores: Support them. When you buy from them, you're supporting two small businesses: us and the store you're buying it from.

I hate the phrase win-win. It's the former English teacher in me. But this might be a situation where it actually applies.

Thank you, happy trails, good night and good luck, until next time, au revoir.

Tour of exclusive colorways, stop four!

There is an online store whose wares I love to drool over. I like it for a few reasons. One is that they have beautiful yarns, all made by indie dyers, many of the brands difficult to find.

Another is that they carry colorways one large variety of base yarns, so you're not stuck buying a colorway you love on a base that's not your favorite.

It also helps that I've known the owner of this shop for years, well before she opened her yarn shop. She's good people. I would tell you that she fit back into her size 2 jeans less than 6 weeks after giving birth to twins, but you would hate her a little bit, and I don't want that.

If you haven't checked out Pulling at Strings yet, make yourself a cup or a glass or, heck, a STEIN of your favorite vice and drool over the eye candy.

Jenn gave me several colorway inspirations, all based on her home state of Maryland. The fact that I lived there for ten years helped tremendously, as it wasn't much work to picture exactly what she was talking about.

This is Chivalrous, inspired by Maryland's Renaissance Festival, the second largest in the country.

It's a courtly mix of regal purple, red, emerald, gold, and amber. 

I like being pushed to do colorways like this, because they are not ones I gravitate toward naturally. But then I'm always happy with the results and am glad I made an appearance at the party.

If you visit Pulling At Strings and enter Chivalrous in the search box in the upper right, you can see everything they currently have instock in this colorway. They even have some mini skein sets and roving up for grabs!

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Another trip to Florida brings us Sea Flower, an exclusive colorway belonging to A Good Yarn in Sarasota.

Sea Flower is part of A Good Yarn's Purl Diver collection, which are colorways based on amazing underwater photographs.

You can see the bright orange, black, and white in the clown fish <Insert Finding Nemo joke here>, and the pretty taupes and rose pinks in the rest of the skein.

This is what I call a transitional handpainted, where the colorway is designed to be conceptual and to transition from one color to the next once the skein is twisted up.

This is a labor intensive colorway, involving lots of tiny paintbrushes, but I think the end results are worth it.

A Good Yarn has this colorway instock, and they'd be happy to send you some. You can visit their web store here for easy stash enhancement.

(I adore this one on Springvale Bulky. Sigh.)

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As luck of the draw would have it, another transitional handpainted gasped for air.

This one is based on salmon. Not just the color salmon pink, but the actual fish.

Copper River salmon is said to be some of the best in the world because of its high oil content, and salmon fishing is the industry on which the city of Cordova, Alaska thrives.

When I made this for The Net Loft, I knew I couldn't just slap some light pinks and grays on Adorn Sock and call it close enough.

My bluff would be called. Who can predict the mayhem that would ensue.

Salmon -- the fish -- has marbled silvery gray skin, which I hope I captured, and the meat is actually a few different shades of pink with a yellow and brown undertone.

It's a manly pink. Because it's a pink that has its own name. Salmon.

When I'm designing a colorway, I will often settle on a color recipe (how to make the salmony pinks, which shades of gray I'll use), and then I experiment with dye application methods.

Here are a few of my earlier versions of Salmon.

This was lacking variation. It didn't say fish to me.

This is a little closer, but it seems like the salmon skin is too mixed up in the meat. It gives me the feeling of picking bones out of a piece of fish in a restaurant.

You can see a side by side comparison here.

The method I settled on uses both kettle dyeing and hand painting. Because I will rarely seek the path of least resistance when it come to yarn. I'd rather make more work for myself and have things just so than go easy and be less than thrilled with the results.

It's part of my personality that spills over into most areas of my life. My husband loves this about me, don't you, honey?

Here's one example of how it knits up:

If you want to grab some of this colorway, you can give The Net Loft a call at (907) 424-7337, or email them at thenetloft3 AT yahoo DOT com.

Speaking of salmon, I had spicy salmon sushi for lunch today. How deliciously coincidental.

cutest baby hat ever?

If there were such a contest, this might possibly be the winner.

It could really only be cuter if it were photographed on a real baby instead of an orange Happy Birthday balloon.

Did you know that blocking is extremely important to your knitting? And that when blocking a hat, Happy Birthday balloons are imperative?

If you're kntting a hat for a grown up, your blocking apperatus might look more like this:

In this case, I inflated the balloon to about the size that a newborn's head should be. Then I asked someone else in the studio who has also given birth to three children, "Is this the size of a newborn's head?" We inflated and deflated until we got it just about right.

Never mind that everyone else in the studio was thinking, "Yikes... that is actually... not small... considering..."

How's this? It does not feel small during the last two months of pregnancy. In fact, it feels like it's the size and weight of a bowling ball.

But after the baby is born, he or she seems so tiny and helpless. Much like this:

If you were so inclined, you could use a tape measure to choose the appropriate size for your balloon blocking.

The Craft Yarn Council has worked to standardize sizes and measurements used throughout the knitting world. The guidelines are voluntary, so don't count on all designers to follow them, but they're a really good starting point, if you're not sure what size head a three year usually has. (It's bigger than you think.) (You can see all the standard body measurements here.)

Knitting a newborn hat is one of the best projects in the world. Not only is it totally squeal inducing, but it's incredibly fast, and a great way to use up your yarn stash.

I used a great pattern for this hat that I will happily knit again, called the Small Things Bonnet, designed by Carina Spencer. It uses worsted weight yarn, and has both rounded bonnet or a pixie hood style. Totally recommend it and the sweater/romper that goes along with it.

As always, I made a couple of tiny modifications to the pattern, not because the pattern was lacking, but more because I must have some kind of block when it comes to doing something exactly as written. I did the front section in a contrasting color, and love how it looks. I made the pixie just a little bit pointier. Love it.

I chose a button in a third color that I think pops with the gray and pink. Although the baby is a newborn and not into mouthing things yet, I still sewed the button on really well to make sure it wouldn't be a choking hazard.

Can't you just picture it on sweet little Ceci?

I just checked again, and yep. It's still one of the cutest hats I've ever seen.

For more information on my Happy Birthday balloon blocking tutorial, you can visit this post.

Made any cute baby things lately?

tour of exclusive colorways, stop three

Today I drew three new colorways out of a coffee mug on my desk. (No, it didn't have coffee in it. Come on now... give me some credit.)

I drew out Loopalicious, this bright and fun colorway based around one of the blue colors repeated throughout the Loops South store in Tulsa:

I love the inside of this store for so many reasons.

For starters, it's well-organized and clean. And let's be honest friends, not all yarn shops are. I have seen many stores that feel disheveled, scattered, and hard to navigate. But not this one:

Loops South has a particularly modern look that suits them well.

If you own a yarn shop, I'm not telling you that you that customers must be able to belly up to the Mac bar to look up projects on Ravelry. You don't have to have white leather seating.

But you do need to dust and vacuum and take out the trash, particularly if someone microwaved leftover salmon in your back room for lunch.  Every day. You do need to reface your products continuously. 

You do need to make your store visually appealing, so that people want to come and browse around for an hour, particularly if they are new to knitting and don't have a clue what they're looking for. You want to attract new customers, right? Make the store a place that people want to come into.

I'm not singling anyone out here, and --knock wood-- we're lucky to work with awesome stores.

I feel like I need to start a web series called Yarn Shop Takeover, in which I get to take over a store for a couple of days and completely redecorate and reorganize things from a customer-centric shopping experience.  Good shop owners understand that they are high end, specialty retailers. I often say in my classes that it's important to love what you're knitting with -- the yarn, your tools -- and that you're knitting things you enjoy making, because no one is knitting because it's cheaper.

There are many reasons to knit. Cheaper is not one of them. Most of us don't spend $10-$30 per pair of socks in a store. But we are willing to spend that on one skein of sock yarn, and then we have to make the socks ourselves. We won't pay $30 for premade socks, but we will for socks we have to spend days or weeks working on.

If there were a store in the mall that sold $30 socks, I can guarantee you that the store would be clean, well lit, well organized, and pleasant to walk around in.

Yarn shops are high end retail. They sell the materials for a $300 sweater that you then have to make yourself.

Loops gets it right. There is more than one kind of right, but this is one of them.

I've been there twice -- you can see more about my visits here, here, and here.

Loops has a web store, which you can visit from anywhere in the world. And you can also call them at

1-877-LOOPSOK. The Loops Troops know what they're doing. They know their stock and they know how to help people.

(And hey, if you own a shop and want me to come take over for a couple of days -- use the contact form in the upper right. We'll see what we can work out, even if it's just a virtual consultation.)

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On to our next stop on the tour! I knew there would be a high probability (Because I am really, really excellent at statistics. Which is to say that I know how to multiply and divide.) that I would choose at least one more colorway from The Net Loft in Alaska. The probability is high (again, my genius statistical mind did these calculations), because there are just so many custom colorways for this one shop. Each year for the past few years we've done a new crop of them, so the collection is now quite sizable.

This one has been popular with both male knitters (and Cordova has plenty of rugged, outdoorsy men who know how to knit), and with women knitting for the dudes in their life.

Please tell me you know what animal this looks like. Because gosh darn it if I didn't go the Great Lakes Aquarium to compare for myself.

Getting the gold -- and the right proportion of it -- was part of the challenge. The other part was creating that subtle variation throughout the dark brown and black feathers a bald eagle has.

Here's an earlier draft of this colorway, which has too much white, and the browns and grays are not dark enough. The feedback I got from The Net Loft was that it was "good" and "almost there," but that it needed to look "more like an eagle perched on the top of a tree with its wings folded."

I'll be honest, my first thought when I heard that the wings needed to be folded whilst the national bird perched atop a tree was along the lines of, "Umm..."

But I get it now. It needed more dark brown and black, because the proportion of the eagle that is actually white and gold and medium brown is actually quite small.

Bald Eagle actually looks pretty darn nifty knit up. I've seen some sweet hats, scarves, and fingerless gloves made from it.

And next up is The Net Loft's Lupine colorway.

We went through at least nine versions of this colorway before I finally found something that was both pleasing to the eye and that looked like the flowers that grows prolifically in the Alaska summer. You can see some of my drafts here. Lupines come in purple, pink, and periwinkle, and some have lots of white at the tips, while others don't. We worked to find a colorway that would incorporate what was pretty about all the varieties.

We tried some with green. Some with white space.

(Photo Source)

And this is what we decided on: a variegated deep purple with accents of pink and periwinkle. This picture doesn't do the depth of color justice.

You can see some more pictures of both Bald Eagle and Lupine on the Net Loft's blog, here.

If you'd like to grab Bald Eagle or Lupine from The Net Loft, drop them a line at thenetloft3 AT yahoo DOT com, or call them at (907) 424-7337. I promise they are friendly and helpful.

I hope you're enjoying these behind the scenes peeks into the genesis of exclusive colorways. And hey, if you're not, then you probably like meatloaf and football. And then there's no hope for you at all.