We have moved!

Squeaky Elliot has moved and become Midwinter Yarns.

With the emphasis still very much on natural fibres, Midwinter Yarns aims to promote Scandinavian yarns and knitting traditions. As such, we have handpicked a selection of  beautiful wool, alpaca and linen yarns that have hitherto not been available in the UK market and we hope that you will enjoy discovering them. We also stock a commercially dyed version of Squeaky Elliot's Lovely Linen in lots of great colours, and will continue to stock both Gower Wool and Elfyn's Lace.

We hope you will come and join us at www.midwinteryarns.com  !

New beginnings

So spring decided to spring this morning, with all the mad and wonderful shapes that Mother Nature creates

                     

And with spring come fresh ideas: Squeaky Elliot Yarns will soon be moving to a whole new website where they will be joined by a hand picked selection of beautiful,  Scandinavian yarns. 

We are working hard on the website itself and excitedly awaiting yarn deliveries, but in the meantime, please enjoy 10% off everything in the Etsy store in our Moving Sale!  Just enter MOVE14 in the coupon window at checkout and don't forget to check back here for further announcements :)

Any given Thursday

Cup of tea, a little knitting. Unwinding after a day of work and a rainy drive home.

493 sts

Nr 3 on my 12 UFOs in 2014 Knitalong:

Colour Affection aka Ode to my trip to Finland

Yarn: Thin Pirkkalanka purchased in Helsinki 2012
Needles: 4mm

 





It turned out huuuuuge! Well over two meters long!
Lovely, mindless knit, just lots and lots of garter stitch with a little interest added in watching the short rows take effect.
I really like this yarn - it's sort of rustic but actually softer than I thought it would be, and knits up really light and bouncy. The colours are bright and lovely too, and there are many more in the range. As is often the case with scandinavian yarns, it's not easily available from abroad although....watch this space...changes may be afoot at squeaky elliot!

Also want to take the opportunity to wish everyone a belated hapus Dydd Gŵyl Dewi - Happy St David's day!

 

Caerphilly was full of daffodils galore on Saturday, and Morrisons had sold out of pork and leek sausages by 11am, but I do think that Google said it best of all:
 

 



Bunker Mitts

I have always had a fascination with industrial clothing. I hounded my local army surplus at university and I am still digging through the rails of Emmaus in search of one of those blue factory jackets that will actually fit me. Lately, the obsession is fire fighter's clothing: I think I like the chunkiness of it, coupled with the worn look that comes with regularily being exposed to fire and water. Bunker gear is really expensive to buy, so it's not kept as new and pristine as other uniforms are and I love that.
I had noticed that the big jackets come with extendable cuffs with thumbholes in them and I was already planning on knitting my own version when my mother sent me the most amazing yarn in the post. The yarn was so amazing I couldn't leave the post office carpark because I was squishing it so much!
                                   

The yarn is by Skein, a company whose colours I have always admired but not had the funds to buy for myself, in the Midlands colourway. It's on the Himalaya DK base, and I just can't believe that it is discontinued!!

I think I have mentioned before how, as a yarn dyer myself, it is sometimes hard to find indie yarns that don't use the same bases as I use myself. We don't have many suppliers of undyed yarn here in the UK , so most dyers end up using the same bases. The Himalaya, however, is a completely different texture, and just that is a joy in itself. It is also the most gorgeous, silky blend of Merino and Cashmere, and happened to be the exact colour I had envisaged for my bunker mitts.

So instead of working on finishing nr 3 on my 12 UFOs knit-along like a good girl, I dropped everything and spent the weekend knitting up these very long, plain fingerless gloves, trying to use as much of the yarn as possible. My mother is a little disappointed at how plain they are, but I wanted to let the yarn do the talking, and also, I don't think fire fighters have much lace or cabling in their gear...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feeling Swedish

As the wind and rain are still relentlessly battering the UK, we battened down the hatches this weekend and retreated to the sofa with our cats, many pots of tea and Netflix.

I am currently in the process of trying out different Scandinavian yarns, amongst them Raggsocksgarn. Raggsockor (raggedy socks) are traditional, thick Swedish socks, knitted in aran-weight yarn typically plied in two different colours, adding to the raggedy, rustic effect.
As the yarn is so thick, the socks are really quick to knit up - I made both our pairs in the space of a week - and wonderfully warm to wear of course.

For the ultimate in Swedish chic, wear with clogs, although sadly I don't currently have any !

And continuing the Swedish theme, it was high time for Semlor! These sweet wheat buns filled with marzipan and whipped cream are eaten in the time leading up to Lent, while you can still enjoy all that is sweet and fattening in life.

 

 

And as it's STILL raining outside, the great big storm sale is extended for another 3 days until Wednesday the 13th of February - just enter STORMY14 at checkout for 20% off everything in the shop, including the gorgeous new Gower Wool :)

 



Stormy weather sale!

Well, since the forecast for Wales continues to look like this:

and that sort of weather isn't good for anything but staying indoors with a nice mug of tea and a knitting, we're having a stormy weather sale til the end of the week. A full 20% off everything in the shop, so get it while you can and enter STORMY14 in the coupon code window at check-out.

Stay warm! and dry!

New Embroidery Yarn set

New in the shop today: the Under the Sea collection.

A set of 8 hanks of embroidery wool suitable for crewel work and all kinds of free form embroidery, hand dyed in gently shifting colours on a blue theme - from deep indigo to vibrant turquoise.

Norwegian Grey

First finished object of the year! And this time it's not going anywhere near a washing machine...
I started this sweater when I first learnt to spin two years ago - this Norwegian fibre from the very reasonably priced Adelaide Walker was some of the very first I ever bought.  It originally came as braids of white, grey and brown fibres but
I decided I was bored of knitting stripes, so I borrowed a drum carder and spent many very very very boring hours carding the best part of a kilo of fibre together to make this blend. I am never carding anything ever again.

The yarn is made up of three plies, knit on 6mm needles. Sweater is a basic top down construction, the woven braids on the cuffs and the tag on the back are woven by my friend Jan, which makes this a really extra hand made garment, I think.

 

Better late than never?

Finally, FINALLY, here it is: the 2014 batch of lovely Gower Wool!

100% Welsh Wool, of course, made up of 85% Bluefaced Leicester and 15% Black Welsh fibres.

This year's batch is a little finer than any that I have had before - 330 m (360 yds) per generous 125gr hank. Undyed it is a beautiful pewter shade which, when over dyed, gives gorgeous mottled colours.

The colours above are available in the shop now, and many more to come as fast as I can get them in the pan!

I do hope you will enjoy this lovely yarn!

New Year roundup

a little late, but still, a very Happy New Year to you all!
It was a lovely long break over the holidays, all of it sadly long forgotten within an hour of getting back to work, but nonetheless.

Santa brought an early present on the day before Christmas Eve - my mother and I had gone to buy all the Christmas food and after tea and mince pies at Glanmor's took the obligatory tour around the many charity shops in Caerphilly and spotted this beautiful, completely solid pine chest of drawers with four great big deep drawers. I really wasn't looking for more furniture but I kept hovering around it, trying to figure out where we could squeeze it in in our house and in what is possibly one of the most extravagant moves ever, I now have a sizeable item of furniture dedicated only to.....storing my shawls!

           Also works for storing the occasional cat








There were many lovely christmas presents - some yarn, a Saroyan scarf knitted by my mother, an ice cream maker, some more Trollbeads from Mark and something that I had asked Santa for: a set of KnitPro Symfonie interchangeable needles. A few of the members of my knitting group have them and I'd always sort of scoffed a little and thought if I had a set, I would just swiftly lose all the components and didn't quite see the point of them.....until I found myself regularly borrowing bits from Jan's set.
Of course, with my mother's sewing and embroidery skills in the family, I wasn't about to have to keep them in their original plastic packaging, but in this lovely, personalised case instead :)

 

And I must admit, for my original reticence , interchangeable needles are great! In a bid to escape all the garish, hard core, depressing commercialism of Christmas in the UK (not easy since Mark works in retail) , we tried to barricade ourselves indoors with knitting and Julie Andrews movies as much as possible, and it was really liberating to be able to just think of a project idea and cast it on straight away without worrying about not having the right size needles at hand.

I started on a scrap blanket with all my sock yarn ends. I'd tried to crochet granny squares with them before, but the odd thing about variegated sock yarns is that on their own or in pairs, they look fantastic but loads of them together just comes out all blurry and horrible. Plus, even crocheted, sock yarn is a bit pointless as a blanket, so I really liked this idea - Sediment Scraps Blanket - of holding several strands together to knit. Firstly, it's really quick to knit, the colours all blend together better, and even with just 3 strands of 4ply, it makes a really nice, thick, useable blanket.

I also finally received the extra hank of Finnish wool that I had asked a friend to send me from Helsinki. I bought a green and a deep teal when I was up there last year, but then decided that I needed a third colour so that I could make a Colour Affection shawl, another one of those cult patterns on Ravelry with tens of thousands of projects, and incidentally designed by a Finnish designer which I thought would be appropriate for the yarn and as a memory of that great trip.

 

So there we are, that's some of what I did in my Christmas break (along with eating untold amounts of food). What did you do in yours?

Gifts for Knitters

Our little knitting group had their Christmas party the other night. This year we chose to have a potluck house do over a restaurant meal and I think the idea worked really well! It allowed us to bring food we all enjoyed and have a setting where we could easily knit and chat and really catch up with each other.
The lasting impression of the evening I think was one of carbs. Oh so many carbs....oh so tasty...

The concept was a little new to us as a group so organisation wasn't quite fine tuned. Somehow everyone brought doughy, bready or cakey things.  I tried valiantly to add vegetables to my pasta salad but not even those could cut through the general wheaten goldness of it all. Best of all, when organising the party, it seemed like everyone was going to bring hoummous for our token vegan...in the end, noone did!

Nonetheless, it was all delicious. I parked myself next to these gorgeous Arab pastries and didn't move for the rest of the night. I even squirelled some away to take home and had them for breakfast the next day!





The other great success of the night was our round of Secret Santa. We do try and help our Santas by filling out a little questionnaire beforehand with things like colours we love or hate to work with, our favourite fibres, complete no-nos and non-knitting things we might also like. My tip if you are buying for a knitter? Stay clear of pastels and fun-fur, those made everyones no-no list! My other tip? Ask them if they've got their eye on something in particular. It may seem like less of a surprise then, but it will be something they will definitely use and probably think of you each time they bring that tool or book out for a moment of crafting. Knitting and other crafts are often thought of as a bit of a frivolity and new tools or fancy yarns can fall quite far down the budget priorities in every day life, so receiving something as simple as a cutting mat and roller (as one of the girls asked for, within our £10 budget) as a present is really special.

Here are a few of the other lovely gifts that we exchanged:

Personally hand-dyed yarn for someone with a love of purple:

 

Bright chunky non-animal yarn and home-made vegan chocolates:

 

 

My choice of fibre from Hilltop Cloud fibres, a shop I know my giftee loves....I may or may not have accidentaly bought something for myself while I was there...oops

 

And the gift that I received and that really took me aback by being the most perfect pick for me from the more obscure section of "non-yarn things I also like": A set of small, hand thrown pottery bowls from St Ives

Most surprisingly of all, the person who gave me these has never been to my house or seen the Shelf Of Brown Pottery!

So there we are. We knitters, we like presents and food, we do.





Cowltastic

Here is something that you do not see every day: Mark, wearing an actual warming garment around his neck.

For eleven years, I have offered and begged that he let me knit him something nice and all this time, he has been convinced that anything placed around his bare, freezing neck would result in his immediate strangulation.

So I gave up on the idea and went back to experimenting with my rigid heddle loom. So far, weaving for me has been more about rough, hard wearing textures, like wall hangings or rag rugs, but I've seen lots of really inspiring projects on ravelry and decided to try weaving with nice merino sock yarns. I used two colours of Malabrigo Sock for this - I was hoping to achieve a checkerboard pattern but have found out since that I wasn't using a dense enough reed, so it ended up just stripy. That said, hand dyed colours really come up completely differently when woven instead of knitted, so that was beautiful to see.
The idea was to make myself a cowl that I could loop around twice. I thought I had enough length in the warp but forgot to allow for the springiness of the yarn - once no longer under tension on the loom, the length of fabric shrank considerably to a silly, in between sort of length. Very pretty, but not quite useful. So it stayed draped on the banister for a while. Then I brought it downstairs to try and figure out what I wanted to do with it. And then, one night, Mark started playing with it and *gasp* draping it around his neck, as if to judge its size somehow.

- Honey, would you like a cowl out of that?
- Meh, maybe, if you're not using it for anything else...

Casually, like he was doing me a favour and taking this thing off my hands.
Because I am still new to weaving and every inch of fabric is precious and I can't imagine actually cutting any of it off, I have folded it into all kinds of intricate origami and sewed it up for him.

I, on the other hand, am never shy of wrapping up. One of my favourite buys from this years Wonderwool was some glorious, pure cashmere fibre - at first I thought it was just a natural pale colour, but it was actually a really subtle blend of soft beige, creams and greys. It was so beautiful to spin and even more wondeful to knit....just nothing but fluffy, silky softness, like knitting a cloud.

I wanted something that could fold down in lots of layers, and that reflected the lightness of the yarn, so I chose the super-easy Twist Your Soft Neck Warmer and even challenged myself to knit on larger than needles than the yarn required, something I've never been particularily brave about. I just  kept knitting til I was nearly out of yarn and the thing started to look ridiculously long. It's superb and I love it...I barely take it off when I get home!

Quiet preparations

Happy First of Advent to you all!

For us Swedes, the date marks the beginning of Christmas preparations in earnest - I have been really disappointed to see neighbours around us putting up lights and fully decked Christmas trees half-way through November this year...I know the shops all do it, but seeing it in a residential setting just takes away the magic completely. But as we are now in December for real, I look forward to driving home tonight and discovering all the twinkling lights on the dark way home.
I've even made a stand and brought a little festive cheer into the office this year!

In shop news, I have finally found the formula for my perfect green! Khaki is my favourite colour in the world, yet so far in my yarn dyeing, I've never been quite happy with what's come out of the pan. Until now, that is. As I was developing the different greens for the Woodlands embroidery yarns, I found a simple, reliable khaki....and here it is: Elfyn's Lace in Little Green

 

 I got so excited about it, I also dyed my very private stash of Gower Wool Fibre in it. I'm really enjoying knitting with my own hand spun yarns at the moment, and I've been keeping the fibre for a special project since the rest of it sold out in no time earlier this year, so this is now ready and waiting to be my special Christmas break project. I've been planning a Glacier Sweep for some time - I even started a version last year but wasn't happy with the way it was knitting up.

              

So there we are. Still all sorts of secret Christmas knitting going on that I can't show you, but the first candle is lit, and the Christmas cake is baked and being copiously fed whisky, so here is wishing you happy and stress-free Christmas preparations!

A little knitting

Hrm, blogging in the run-up to Christmas is proving a little trickier than I thought! I have plenty of projects on the go, but can't actually write about them at the risk of spoiling the surprise for those who might be reading this!

So I'll just share my own little indulgences:

 

The first one of my Bunty Mitts - the pattern is so Orla Kiely-tastic that it's a wonder I haven't made these sooner! The yarn is Shilasdair 4ply, a gorgeous vegetable dyed blend of merino lambswool, angora, cashmere and baby camel...it's like butter through the hands, and the shifting colours are mesmerising. 

As the weather is turning colder, I find myself in work daydreaming of rushing home to a cup of tea and a big, chunky, proper woolly knitting and so I've finally made a start on my very own hand spun sweater. It's one of the first yarns I spun when I started learning last year, having carded together 3 natural shades of Norwegian breed wool. It was inspired by the lady who delivers our eggs here in the village - she's not a known or conscious crafter as such, but she wears this wonderful, battered, organic-looking sweater on her rounds which she says is the result of her plucking a sheep, spinning the wool on a wheel she happens to have at the farm and knitting it up "just to see if it would work". 
Mine is far from  the best yarn ever spun: sections of the fabric are a little skewed where the yarn isn't properly balanced and there are bigger specks of white where I didn't quite card the fibre properly but the whole thing just feels so earthy and interesting to watch as it grows.

   

I am planning on sewing this lovely braid woven by friend Jan around the cuffs once it's done, to really complete the home-made-ness of it.