A Tale of Two Yarns – 2KCBWDAY1

Ooh, two yarns to choose from the many I've used in the last 30 years.  A bit of a tall order.

I've been thinking about this all day and it's now 11.43pm.

I think I've decided!

The first yarn I've chosen is Rowan's Designer DK, which (for reasons I'm still unable to fathom) Rowan discontinued several years ago.  This was the yarn that got me into knitting.  That and (I think) reading a magazine article about Kaffe Fassett opened a door to knitting that was previously closed to me.  My yarn-shop experience was, prior to that, limited to what was available to me locally, and locally meant Dovercourt/Harwich.  A seaside town approx eight miles from the village where we lived and where I went to school.  I can't even remember which yarns it stocked, but I'm pretty sure it was of the Sirdar Country Style variety and the patterns I knitted from were those from Woman/Woman's Own/Woman's Weekly.  The magazines my mother and grandmother bought every week.  I remember that at college I knitted a tunic-style jumper that had a beige background, with intarsia roses on the front (I think I did the roses in a terracotta shade).  Rowan DDK changed my perspective on knitting.  The colours and just the feel of the yarn.  It was so different from anything I'd used before and just going into Liberty or John Lewis in the West End of London, or Ries Wools of Holborn and seeing the vast array of colours available (the display of Rowan's lighter-weight DK  which came in 25g skeins --- yumtastic!).

I made a couple of sweaters from Glorious Knitting.  The Toothed Stripe sweater, in which I used DDK, the lighter-weight DK (I can't remember what it was called now - shame on me) plus other yarns, including some mohair, all in shades of blue, purple and pink - plum through to candy-floss.  The other was the Peplum cardigan which I made for my Mum.  Background stripes of burgundy-ish shades, with the burgundy DK Rowan Chenille for the flowers.  I'm not sure if Mum wore the cardigan a great deal, but I know that she like it and appreciated the knitting that went into it.

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The second yarn is another I love, but for different reasons.  This one is Unicorn yarn.  Fingering weight.  A mixture of baby llama, cashmere and silk.  As well as being a divine yarn, it was part of a club and in a way gave me a real sense of the knitting community.  Unicorn was a yarn from the Natural Dye Studio and Fyberspates and ran for 10 (or was it 9?) months in 2009.  Each month, NDS and Fyberspates dyed up several colours each in Unicorn.  Each month a purchase was made, the yarn was sent with an accompanying question for that month.  At the end of the 'quest', answers to each question were sent back (the initial letters of each answer were an anagram of the fibre content of the yarn which was a mystery) and the prize for the winner was 1kg of Unicorn dyed in the colour/s the winner asked for.  I didn't win (the questions were pretty hard), but, as I said before, there was a real sense of community as well as adding to stash a beautiful yarn and I don't think anyone begrudged the winner (it wasn't me!).  I still have some Unicorn in stash, which I will use up in time, either for socks, a shawl or a scarf. 

So, that's it.  Two yarns I love/have loved.

I shall try to keep up with this blogathon... wish me luck!  I'm off to remind myself what day 2 entails!