I'm knitting a triangular shawl at the moment as a sample for the shop. It's Theressa Silver's Conk in Abstract Fiber Tahoma in Pinot Noir colorway.
Made up of increasing sections of stockinette and garter, it's one of those perfect easy Sunday knits that I can haul around to family dinners, baseball games, craft nights, the local wine bar...the yarn and pattern are wonderfully forgiving.
Because of the way the increases are written, it make an unusual funky curved shape that resembles, well, a conks I guess. See it in the shop this week!
In other news, I picked up some yarn from Southern Oregon's ByGeorge Farms at the St. Johns Farmer's Market a couple Saturdays ago. It's amazingly beautiful and the storied stuff of bucolic dreams.
The wool is from the farm's Gotland sheep and is 100% hand sheared, cleaned, carded, spun and dyed by hand, by one woman. Can you say single source?
Each skein even lists the name of the sheep that the wool was sourced from! My personal fav is "Baa Rock" [hehe] but it's pretty hard to choose as these are some super cute sheep! The colors are deep and remind me of PNW brambles and woodsy weekend trips.
The main thing ByGeorge makes is cheese from grass fed Jersey cows. Look at these cheeses! Cheese and yarn is a pretty winning combo to me!
I can't wait to knit these up into something colorful and textured like Night Shift by Andrea Mowry. Maybe I can bring their yarn into the shop as well. We are focused on sourcing locally whenever we can and supporting makers committed to sustainability that honor traditional practices.
One issue we run into when trying to solely carry products that meet these requirements is the scalabilty of quantity and quality. With the time, energy and costs associated with producing such a unique high quality product such as ByGeorge's yarns, it's often unrealistic to produce enough for retail or at a price that is affordable enough for our market. Something often has to give.
Finding creative ways to partner with a variety of different makers at different price points to suit all yarncraft needs is an important goal of our business and we hope to be able to bring St. Johns some special gems such as these hand-made sheep to skein yarns at least once in a while.