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Mini-skeins are the (nearly) guilt-free treat of yarn festivals like this weekend’s Yarndale. You can use the last few pounds of your stash budget and the last few corners of your bag to take home just a few more pops of saturated, sparkly, speckly or variegated goodness. Look around online or at a festival and you’ll find many of our favourite indie dyers offering mini-skeins in various forms. Image may be NSFW.
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One of the best is the lovely Joy at The Knitting Goddess. If you don’t get too distracted by her fabulous screen printed project bags you’ll discover Britsock Colour Wheels. As the name suggests, this is British wool, spun in Yorkshire and in each colour wheel you get 12 x 10g mini skeins, either shading from one colour to another (for example in ‘Gold towards Pink’) or in a joyous rainbow (like ‘Printer Ink’). Can you imagine how grabby my hands were when Joy asked me if I’d come up with a design for the Colour Wheels?
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The Sonia hat is named for Sonia Delaunay. This blog by Kate Davies prompted me to go and see the Sonia Delaunay retrospective at Tate Modern last year and it was easy to see why Delaunay’s work continues to be a source of inspiration to designers. I was particularly taken with the circular motifs that appear in her work, as well as the exploration of how colours behave next to one another. When I designed this hat, with its circular motif, I wanted to give knitters the opportunity to explore colours for themselves.
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Although there are yarn changes every two rows in this stranded colourwork design, it’s actually a fairly easy pattern to follow once it’s set up. The key is the time spent beforehand, shuffling colours wound onto bobbins (which you number afterwards to save your sanity) into your own colour wheel. If you wanted to use a stash of yarn scraps instead of treating yourself to a Colour Wheel you could- you’ll need around 5g/20m of 11 colours and 9g/36m of the colour you use for the brim- my samples used the ‘Grellow’ and ‘Peacock’ Colour Wheels. Either way, it’s very addictive, watching the colour changes as you work through the pattern rows.
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The Knitting Goddess stand at Yarndale will be carrying print copies of ‘Sonia’ this weekend, along with the all-important yarn of course. If you aren’t able to make it to the show or just can’t wait, you can buy your copy of the pattern here in my Ravelry shop.
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