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I've gotten a few emails recently asking how to divide the CLASSIC All Together Now colourway for matching socks. The important thing to notice is that the colourway is not a continuous gradient and instead does have stripes (24 total). Once you can see them it's much simpler to find the colour you're looking for! 

Here's a little sketch to help you plan for your next project:

It's club time again! Come join us for a collection of cozy, colourful self-striping yarn.  

We're offering a three-month yarn club subscription, with a new, exclusive colourway shipped to you each month. This photo shows the mood (but not the actual yarn) of this collection: a rainbow of deep, complex tones. 

Click here for details. 

You're probably here because you saw the yarnharlot's post. (And if you're not, go read that one first...)

To answer your questions:

1. Self-striping sweater yarn is a thing now. Starting with baby sweaters - a single skein gets you a nice striped yoke plus enough of a solid colour for the body and sleeves. 

2. When I say "is a thing now" I mean that I dyed a single skein and then handed it to the most famous knitter in the world who then knit with it and wrote a glowing post about it.

3. Current mental state: *OMG! ...play it cool... WHAAAAAAAT! ...super cool... HURRAY! ...so chill... YAY! repeat from * until basically forever. 

4. So obviously I'm going to be making more of this yarn ASAP.

5. Even the skein pictured above is not the sweater yarn - it's the SHAWL version of the same colours. 

6. I'll let you know as soon as I've made more yarn. The best way to make sure you hear about it is to sign up for my mailing list. (Thank you!)

7. Thank you for all the enthusiasm!

I have these new colourways that I sent off to test knitters to play with. One intrepid tester, Tammy aka Tante Ehm, sent me a few pictures of a gorgeous shawl and casually mentioned that she had designed in on the fly and was thinking of writing it up as a pattern (which was just published last week, go take a look!)

Yeah. It's fantastic. Relatively simple knitting but stunning results. Here it is in the Sweet Baby James and Margaritaville colourways. 

The construction begins with an arrowhead-shaped increase section and then begins shifting and decreasing to create an overall triangle. 

Tammy mentioned that she switched from one section to the other when she had used half of the yarn. Which is cool and also WHY DOES THAT WORK? It that a fluke that is approximately true when you're using the exact amount of yarn Tammy was using (about 170 g)? Or is that always true no matter what size? And anyway, WHY?

I'm a lot of fun at parties, can you tell?  

Right. So. I drew some pictures and I've got an answer.

First of all two notes: The shawl doesn't use the entire skein of yarn. In this colourway the final two stripes aren't used (so good news, there's no worry of running out of yarn during the bind off). 

Second, note that the picture I drew doesn't look like it's the same shape as the shawl - the first section is a triangle rather than an arrowhead, but the geometry is the same. Each row in my sketch is a row in the shawl, even though the actual knitted fabric will be distorted by the placement of the increases and decreases and look much cooler. 

The cast on is at the top of the shawl I've sketched, and increases symmetrically for a while before decreasing asymmetrically. The bind off is the final row of stitches at the bottom. I treated each box in the grid as being X stitches wide and X rows tall, so I can easily draw lines at the appropriate angles to represent, for example, increasing one stitch every second row. It also means this works regardless of how big or small I do my sketch.

Once I'd drawn the two halves of the shawl, all that's left to do is calculate the areas. If that makes your palms sweat, don't worry. You just have to find the cosine of the length of the hypotenuse divided by the shortest line segment and...I kid, I kid. Just count the squares. 

72 squares in the first section and 63 squares in the second section means that my sketch matches reality and the first section uses just slightly more yarn than the second. By following the pattern and starting the decrease section when you've used half your yarn, you'll end up with about 6% of a skein remaining. Tadaah! 

UPDATE: My excitement about this whole thing was to be able to take advantage of the self-striping yarn and use as much of the skein as possible. You could, of course, also make a smaller shawl by starting the section section at any time before you've used half the yarn. Or if you want to use much more than half the yarn for the first section you'll need a second skein. 

Oh, and since someone is bound to ask, my notebook is a Kyokuto Expedient notebook with 5 mm dot grid and it is perfection. 

Random update for ya:

We're back from Knit City! Here's a little peek at our booth from the weekend. Not a fantastic photo, but I always love seeing other people's booths, so it seemed fair to share too.

(Fellow vendors: if you're wondering, nearly everything I've got in my booth is either gridwall or IKEA. I got a lot of questions about the lights - they are IKEA Hektar lights that we've attached to those gridwall faceouts.)

I'm taking a few days off this week, but will be back at it next week - dyeing again and restocking the shop with everything that came home with us from Knit City. 

My dyeing queue the next couple weeks includes: 1. your Knox Fade pre-orders, 2.  Summer Nights collection and Knox Fade for the shop. 3. Weekend and Phi have been the most requested lately, so those too! 

We are busily preparing for Knit City in Vancouver. Our shop will be sold out until we return in early October.