Sources of Inspiration: Double-knitting and Local Yarn
February 12, 2019At this time of year, deep in the throes of a Canadian winter, I dream of summer joys. My husband and I have lived in Brockville (Ontario) for 4 years. We almost always spend our summer Saturday mornings at Brockville’s outdoor farmers’ market, chatting with vendors & stocking up on fresh vegetables and fruit. Last summer I became acquainted with two new vendors of organic produce: Addison Gardens and Fair Sun Farm. It’s wonderful to have local organic produce available (aaah, memories of summer!), but most exciting of all is that they’ve both branched out into yarn production.
This is where inspiration comes in! Beautiful fibres or interesting techniques are often the sparks that start my design fire. Both came together in the first project I made from these local yarns: a double-knit gaiter scarf and hat made with Addison Gardens’ luscious mostly local Angora blend yarn (so soft! so wonderful to knit with!). Zoltan & Eszter raise Angora rabbits, and they have begun harvesting the rabbits’ abundant wool,
combing their coats and sending the fibres to Legacy Lane Fiber Mill in New Brunswick to be processed and combined with Canadian alpaca and merino wool. Eszter dyes some of the resulting skeins with natural dyes. Only 22 skeins were produced from the first batch of Angora fibres — I bought one cream (undyed) skein and one skein in a beautiful soft green (black turtle bean and turmeric dyes with iron mordant). Now I’m wishing I had purchased more! The yarn seemed to call out for a double-knit treatment (an intriguing reversible technique), so I designed a snowflake themed gaiter scarf and hat, and I’m really pleased with how they turned out.
Double-knitting is an advanced technique where two colours of yarn are alternately cast on to the needles and worked separately, resulting in a double-layered fabric that is connected wherever one colour moves from the back to the front or the front to the back. When I first learned how to double-knit I felt like my brain was being totally re-arranged to manage the complexities of remembering which yarn to knit and when to move each strand to the front or the back. Now it’s much easier, but still I think double-knitting should be in a list of exercises to keep the brain sharp. I don’t make projects using this technique very often, since it takes twice as long to knit and uses twice the yarn, but the resulting reversible scarf and hat were definitely worth it. Warm, soft, stylish and mostly local.
Next: I’ve just begun to work with Fair Sun Farm’s Lopi Soft Spun yarn … stay tuned!