handmade by stefanie

I used to think of duplicate stitch simply as a way to avoid intarsia, but it's also a great technique for weaving in your ends invisibly, especially in colorwork projects. Earlier in the year, I knit the Very Important Villager hat in two naturally-dyed colors of Rambouillet yarn from Shepherd's Lamb . This breed-specific wool yarn has great stitch definition and lends itself well to colorwork: Fun fact: if you consistently hold one color below the other as you work, the colorwork motif will look crisper (this is known as color dominance ). Plus, the wrong side will look just as lovely as the right! If you're new to duplicate stitch, here is a great tutorial video from Very Pink Knits . I think of it as a 3-step process: you start by bringing your yarn up in the middle of the stitch BELOW the one you want to duplicate, then behind both bars of the stitch ABOVE the stitch you are duplicating. You return the yarn through to the wrong side the same way you starte...

Not too long ago, I was sent a lovely box of yarns from Antonio and Molly Manzanares of  Shepherd's Lamb , a family-owned and -operated ranch in New Mexico. They raise a flock of Rambouillet and Navajo-Churro sheep to make organic their organic yarns which are processed and spun in the USA, then hand-dyed with low impact or natural dyes on site. I've never worked with Navajo-Churro before, so I gravitated towards these 6 colors and decided to do a gamp-style woven scarf (for any curious non-weavers out there, here is a great definition of a gamp ). The mix of natural/undyed yarns and naturally dyed colors was really fun to work with, and I have enough yarn left over to each one which I can use in future projects. Now that i know how each color interacts with one another, that will make choosing colors a lot easier ( click here to see what colors of Navajo-Churro yarn they currently have available ). I'm guessing that many of my readers have not worked wi...

Some of the newest projects I've started are mixing up my usual grey/blue/green color scheme with an unlikely hue: pink! It's not my favorite color by a long shot, but when you are knitting for people who do  like pink, then working with pink yarn just comes with the territory. For example, I started these two-at-a-time socks with a skein of Long Dog Yarn I picked up at Knit 1 earlier this year: Once I finish the never-ending  Starshower gradient cowl , I'll cast on for a hat with this Rambouillet yarn that I recently bought from Shepherd's Lamb : I'm also working on a design using a new yarn base from Bijou Basin Ranch called Himalayan Summit. Of the three variegated colors they currently have in this yarn, this is probably not the one you'd expect me to pick, but I just gravitated to it while I was in their booth at Wisconsin Sheep & Wool earlier this month. It's definitely not as pink as the other projects, but I won't be able ...