Starting a project......

This post got buried in my post list as a draft - it should have announced the start of my Caller Herrin' knit - and here it is July 12 - a bit late as I am ready for the Applöse post!

Stranded (fair isle) projects usually use many shades of yarn.  One of the subtlties of "fair isle" knitting is the multitude of shades available in the traditional yarns.

So, the first thing to do when starting a multi-coloured project is to wind the yarns (if they come in skeins) and to make yourself some kind of shade legend - make it easy for you to see which shade is which.

So I'm ready to start Caller Herrin' - in this case the yarn used in Alice Starmore's Hebridean yarn.  This yarn comes in 35 luscious shades - and you'd think that with "only" 35 shades it would be easy to tell them apart - but these yarns are gorgeous heathered yarns - and the shades used in Caller Herrin' are similar....so to make it easy for me, I took lengths of yarn and threaded them through the hole on the shade tag.  I'll keep these for future reference - and I'll always know which shade is which.

I've wound the skeins into balls and I'm ready to swatch.

This pattern calls for a gauge of 7 stitches to the inch on 3.25 mm needles.  (I get 8 sts to the inch on 3.25 with the Jamieson's yarns which I think are a little thinner.  Yup - 2 ply Hebridean is 85m per 25g while Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift is 105m per 25g.)

So I'll be swatching on 3.25mm needles to see what I get.  As I mentioned previously - this seems to be a small hat....so I'll be making adjustments. '