Saturday, Mom heard on regional news that Sunday was the last day of a yarn fair held all last week in Kaysersberg, a little town an hour away by car, so we spent our Sunday afternoon walking around in the sun and... buying fibery things. The fair was small, only eight or ten exhibitors, but really varied and nice, with a mix of weavers, knitters and felt-makers, and products ranging from organic yarns (dyed in vegetable dyes) to felt jewelry to hats and bags, etc. Mom found great felted wrist warmers/mitts (not knitted and then felted, but wet felted only) for a friend of hers with a birthday coming up. I nearly bought a felt hat.
I did buy 2 skeins of a fat single ply of wool-linen blend (260m) in a wonderful acid green to knit a quick scarf for a friend (I'm thinking 7mm needles and the Yarn Harlot's one row scarf pattern), as well as 100g of a tweedy hairy wool (mohair blend?) in a wonderful tawny rust color highlighted with a discreet strand of lurex. That one is much thinner, DK or sport, perhaps even thinner.
Both came from the same table and are the work of the dyer Catherine Morel for her shop 'L'atelier de Laine Garance', which Google found only one mention of in all of the internet, here, in 2005. I will keep her card preciously, as her yarn looked wonderful. I'll to ask her for a color card.
I have started knitting the scarf and stopped when I had used the whole first skein; my plan is to knit a pair of mitts with the second skein, which won't use all of it, and then to use the rest to lengthen the scarf. The first mitt is done, though I fought tooth and nail and messed up the kitchener stitch about 5 times, ouch. I'm trying to knit a second one twin to it, which might prove hard as I sort of improvised loosely, once more, on Ysolda Teague's wonderful garter stitch mitts pattern. I'm doing these in a very different gauge, with a different stitch count, and this time not even in garter but in stockinette, so... Wish me luck that I can replicate what worked once!
(The reason I couldn't resist casting on to try those in stockinette is that I desperately needed a reason to put into practice the fabulous Japanese short rows method I finally "got" the other day. I'm not using a pin, because now that I got it, I don't need to - and oh, this clever trick fills me with such joy!)
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