Category Archives: Qiviut

Qiviut Argyle

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OK. This brings to an end by argyle-athon. For now anyway. So it is fitting that my last pair is in uber-lux Qiviut :o )

From Arctic Qiviut in Alaska: 35% Qiviut  40% Superwash Merino 15% Bamboo and 10% Nylon; ~ 375 Yards/100g.  Hand wash in cool water; dry flat. The accent diamonds are 70% Qiviut 20% Merino 10% Nylon left overs from previous projects. The heels and toes are reinforced with a putty coloured Wooly Nylon.

This pair is size Medium, knit with the 72 cylinder and 36 ribber on the Verdun 47.

My photo colours are a tad off on my monitor. The main colour leans a little more to the sand/tan than I’m seeing.

So – now I’m going to see if I remember how to knit anything besides argyle…

(But, I really should look for a pencil or crayon and make some notes on all the tweaks I made to the original 60 stitch pattern so that I remember next binge.)

Happy New Year

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My only New Years Resolution – to not buy more sock yarn until I make a bigger dint in my stash – has already failed ;o(

I take comfort in knowing that most of you reading my blog have also failed in this goal.

Here’s a few things that I simply had to have:

Koigu

A few bags of Koigu to replenish the gaping holes in my Koigu bins. Especially the multi-multi mixed colour skeins. (KPPPM – 100% Merino)

Buffalo

 And this, a  gift from Taiu at Koigu, is a sample of a buffalo yarn they are custom dyeing for Buffalo Gold.  I don’t have the exact stats on it – butit is 50% Buffalo and 50% Mulberry Silk. Its a lace weight – I would compare weight to Cashmara Lace from Pat Fly.

Neither buffalo nor silk have much elasticity, so I’ll knit this up with a strand of lycra and see what happens!

Qiviut

And fresh from Alaska. and in the nick of time,  some more Qiviut sock yarn to restash that empty shelf. (35% Qiviut 40% Superwash Merino 15% Bamboo 10% Nylon)

I haven’t knit a sock since a few days before Christmas. I hope I remember how.

My first project will be to knit this up:

Lornas

I have a few bags of Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock in natural (un dyed) left over from a project a few years ago. I’ve dyed a bag in washfast acid dye Jet Black.  (80% Superwash Merino 20% Nylon)

The Prochemical website suggests using Jet Black at 5% WOF which works out to about 4.5 teaspoons per pound. I find this way-y-y-y too strong. The last batch I dyed at that rate went in the garbage after 10 washes and rinses failed to get rid of the excess dye. I find 2 – 2.5% much more satisfactory – it gives me a good deep black plus rinse water that is almost clean.

Jesse

And here’s a Happy New Year from Jesse (100% Superwash Dog). I got my self a new (to me, from EBay) zoom lens for my camera. Merry Christmas to me, from me.  I don’t really need a zoom to photograph Jesse, but I hope to get some better closeups of the sheep, and maybe even the deer that so often graze my fields.

Arctic Qiviut

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Here is a new-to-me Qiviut blend sock yarn from Arctic Qiviut in Alaska.

This blend is 35% Qiviut  40% Superwash Merino  15% Bamboo and 10% Nylon.  Colour Natural. Approximately 375 yards/100 grams. Hand wash in cool water, dry flat recommended.

This is quite a different blend than what I’ve been knitting (70/20/10 qiviut/merino/nylon) and it is approximately the same gauge.

This yarn has a luxurious feel – but not quite as baby’s bum – less I think to the lower % qiviut than to the presence of the bamboo which adds a silk type luster (and added strength) to the mix. While not field tested on my feet yet, the yarn has a  sturdier feel to it  and the increase in merino gives some extra elasticity as well.

This pair is Size Large, knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47. I’ve used a putty coloured Wooly Nylon on the heels and toes – closet colour I could match.

I squeaked the first pair of Large from 100 g skein. On the second pair I was a few yards short. So if I had only one skein left and needed a Large pair I’d shorten up the leg about 5 rows just to be safe. (This pair: 25 row topper, 90 row leg, 80 row foot.)

I also have another blend of Qiviut to try from Arctic Qiviut – but you’ll have to wait until I play with it before I share.

 

 

Qiviut

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I got another new batch of qiviut recently. It’s another custom spun batch – fingering weight – 70% qiviut 20% merino 10% nylon. I’m guessing the yardage at about 400ish/100 g.

This batch is a soft pale grey.

Pictured is a pair of size Large, knit with the 72 cylinder on the Verdun 47. I’ve added a pale grey Wooly Nylon as I knit the heels and toes.

The Wooly Nylon colour is a good match – it barely shows against the qiviut. A close up look at the photo (click it) shows the beauty of this grey – its a complex – almost heather – mixture of tones, reflecting the natural colours in the qiviut fiber.

And the bonus? I’ve knit up 10 skeins so far, and nary a knot to be found.

The feel of this sock yarn is unbelievable. Who’d ever have thought a pair of ‘grey socks’ could feel so fantastically amazing!

Qiviut Socks

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Here are some bespoke Qiviut Socks I’ve been working on.

70% Qiviut  20% Merino 10% Nylon; fingering weight; hand wash.

Alas, my photos look like black and white, which they are not! The colours are actually a browny-grey, and if I fiddle with them, they just come out brown ;o(

Anyway…

The top pair is size Large, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47. They have a 3:1 mock rib hem top. There is a narrow accent stripe just under the hem top, in the same accent tone as the heels and toes. Heels and toes are also reinforced with wooly nylon.

The middle pair is and adaptation of my Small (formerly called Medium): with a 2:1 ribbed top and a short leg. Heels and toes are in the darker accent colour and also reinforced with wooly nylon.

The last photo is to show a comparison of the leg length between this bespoke pair and my regular Qiviut pattern.

At The Dye Pot

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The last Qiviut I got is a large batch of a single natural colour – I would describe as a greyish-brown.

I decided to dye a few skeins to use for accents.

I’ve never dyed dark natural fiber before, and Qiviut is very expen$ive so I didn’t want to dally to long on a learning curve.

So I decided to first see what compare the Qiviut to samples from my library of dyes, so see if it was related to any particular colour. The most cohesive chit was the Mouse Grey.  Various other blacks, charcoals, browns and greys didn’t look as much from the same family to the Qiviut.

 

This kind of surprised me, as I usually work with Mouse Grey in the lower values – much lighter than the Qiviut colour I would be trying to dye over.

I gambled two  100 g skeins and used a deep intensity of the dye – 3 tsp for the 2oo grams of fiber (70% Qiviut, 20% Merino 10% Nylon).

That was much more dye than I needed, and even after a good long simnmer there was a lot of dye not exhausted.

 

There was quite a bit of cucky on the side of the pot and in the bath itself. The residue was coloured somewhere between bad coffee and strong tea.

Here is how the yarn turned out:

 

I’m very pleased with the result. The dyed skein, to me, looks like a deeper value of the natural colour on the right.

Oh – see the yarn I tied the skeins with – that’s a worsted weight pure crap wool I bought  a zillion pounds of to learn with when I got my first sock knitter. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.  Still, I have enough of it to tie skeins for dyeing well into the next century.

The dyed skein in the photo is still damp, though I did spin it out in the washing machine after soaking in the rinse water. It may dry a wee bit lighter.

Qiviut and the Pea

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Knots are annoying. I know it’s unrealistic to hope for a totally knot-free world, but that doesn’t make knots any less annoying.

There are knots. And there are knots. Sometimes the join is done beautifully and the knot is  indiscernible. Other times the knot is a horrid wad the size of a pea. And not a mushy-for-baby soft pea, but a frozen fossilized pea….such as the one in the above photo ….right at the bottom of the shin where a hiking boot would brand this knot deep into a leg.

I’m not totally complaining, as this knot was enough of an excuse to move this pair of Qiviut socks from inventory to my personal sock shelf. But still, the knot had to be dealt with.

For a knot that must die, I find the easiest way to deal with it (other than catching before it’s knit into the sock!) is to duplicate stitch along the row it sits in, on either side of the knot. I’ve done it in red just to show what I mean.

See how the knot is right smack in between the tops and bottoms of my duplicate stitches. (This is the inside-out of the sock.)

And this photo, above, is the actual duplicate stitching, done with a scrap of Qiviut.

When the stitching is done, I simply snip off the knot. (If you duplicate stitch the wrong row, this is where you find out!)

And here is the right side of the sock – the stitching is barely noticeable now,  and will be virtually invisible after washing.

End result - pea sized knot vanished to the garbage;  pair of toasty yummy Qiviut socks for the Soxophone Player.

Qiviut

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I knit up the remainder of my Qiviut stash. Well, all except the end bits of each skein.

The above pair is size Medium +, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47.

I had a few skeins of the Very Dark Brown (even close up to the naked eye its hard to tell from black) and quite a few skeins of the natural Fawn colour. So I knit most as above.

But I did end up with almost a whole dark skein left, so I knit this Large pair, also on the 72 cylinder Verdun 47.

I can probably squeak another 2 Large pair or 3 Medium pair with my bits, but I’ll save that for the new year, or at least until after the fall shows have wrapped, when I can relax a little and do some stripe work.

The yarn is fingering weight, 70 % Qiviut, 20% Superwash Merino`10% Nylon. I’ve lost the yardage, but its more like a Kroy weight than an Opal weight.  I set my tension 3/8 turn looser than my ‘normal’ for all sizes except XL, which I set a full 1/2 turn looser.

It’s been an ‘exotic week’ – cleaning up the stash of Qiviut and of Cashmara Lace. The former washed, blocked, taged, and ready to go; the latter hopefully closed up tonight and on the weekend.

Qiviut Country

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This is two 100g skeins of fingering weight Qiviut Sock Yarn… 70% Qiviut 20% Merino 10% Nylon. The

Here is another pair of Welsh Country Stockings, adapted from a pattern by Nancy Bush, and using Jenny Deter’s fair isle technique for sock machines.

This pair is size Large, knit with the 72 needle cylinder on the Verdun 47.

I did the big boo boo on the first go at these socks…. on sock #2 (isn’t it always!) I misplaced the first stitch of the first row of the fair isle…so everything was off by one stitch.

@%$%^&^((%$#@*

Sometimes I’ll chuck a sock rather than frog it. But that’s not likely to happen with Qiviut! So frog it I did, and then knit myself a new sock#2.