FO: Elizabeth Shawl from North Ronaldsay Sheep

I have probably noted before that sometimes yarn must sit in stash for a while before it tells you what it needs to be. Such was the case with this yarn purchased on North Ronaldsay. It was sheared from North Ronaldsay sheep ON North Ronaldsay. The yarn was also processed and spun on North Ronaldsay.  The sheep are special and supposedly their wool is soft because they eat seaweed.


 I went to Scotland 10 years ago...I've been waiting THAT LONG for this yarn to tell me what it wanted to be.  It has been cast on and then frogged for perhaps 5 projects before this one.

North Ronaldsay is one of the islands in Shetland.  We took a day trip there during the tour, taking a small plane from Lerwick. The pilot looked a bit like Clooney.

When I buy a yarn from a different country, I want the yarn to speak to me, and either the yarn or I express the need for it to be something related to that locale.

I ran into Dee O'Keefe's Elizabeth Shawl a while back. I actually first tried this yarn in Dee's Elizabeth Wrap, but it didn't seem right. (A triangular shawl, while not traditional, always seems right.) The shawl has traditional Scottish lace patterns.

The yarn is soft and has the usual nice wooly spring to work with. I started it before a trip to England in May. Perhaps I was inspired because I was with the same tour guide as on the Scotland trip!

The yarn is a two ply fingering weight with a gauge of 4 sts per inch. I love this shawl.

Oatland Island Sheep

Had a grand time last weekend at Oatland Island Wildlife Center at their annual sheep shearing and fiber demonstrations.  Oatland is a center for "conservation, education, discovery" on the outskirts of Savannah.  I was surprised to see that they have many animals including two bison, wolves, a cougar, and two Shetland sheep, both males, who somehow manage to survive our hot summers!

The Fiber Guild of the Savannahs generously donates their time to do a "sheep to shawl" demonstrating all aspects of fiber prep from shearing to weaving, in support of Oatland and the fiber arts.
I've watched sheep shearing a couple times in my life but have never seen such a tender loving (and slow) production of it. The women are using those old fashioned hand shears that my Dad used to use to trim the edges of the lawn!

Someone's nephew practicing his hand carding…he promised me that when he grows up he will have a farm with four sheep and that Aunt Wendy could keep the wool.  An hour later after having so much fun at this event he revised his total to five sheep….we have not yet discussed the breed….

There was spinning of last year's fleece

Here's an antique wool wheel, begging for some restoration

Ginned cotton 

The shawl was actually woven from last year's fiber, which had been mill-prepped. I was expecting to see a lovely lanolin-y hand knit triangle produced on the spot, but that will be at another event!

There was also some dyeing going on;  here's an indigo pot

My darling nephew cracking black walnuts which then went into the dyepot

I would love to do this over an open fire!

And here are some other interesting sights 

This Scottish "shotgun" style cabin is a creation of Scottish southern forebears. I had no idea that the "shotgun" style building, where front and back doors are in line, and often seen in our Low Country beach homes, was Scottish in origin. It was moved from another location in Georgia and restored, it dates to to 1830's

Baking cornbread in a fireplace, the concave lid has hot coals placed on it

 A crusher for sugar cane

The cane is then boiled in a huge vat, they actually still do this and sell the cane syrup

The Coastal Empire Beekeeper's Association has been busy here. Here bees are getting a drink of water, the stones add needed minerals

Bison…no the soft under coat is not harvested

Sleeping wolf

Another hap

So...someone to whom I'm related doesn't read my blog, so it makes no difference that I post something regarding her Christmas gift...

She travelled in Skye a couple of years ago and bought some yarn.  It is an itchy business...she couldn't tell me where exactly she's gotten it.

She tried to knit something with it, no luck, and "gifted" it to me.

My inclination was to do another hap...as a gift back to her.

I doubled the yarn.  The yarn is cream with some brown.  Makes me think of Scottish Blackface.  Who the heck knows...

I knit a hap square, and added churro handspun from Cassie to do the "traditional"  feather and fan lace border.  Luckily the natural colors look OK together.

You know, on a cold night with no central heating, this would be quite warm!  It's 4" by 4'

Knitting Yowes

Having completed almost all of my holiday knitting, I am feeling free to pursue a couple of new projects. I was captivated by Kate Davies' Rams and Yowes. (Thank you Kate!)  So glad to know that I was misspelling "ewe" at least by Scottish standards!

I'm only several inches into it but here is a sample couple of rows.

I have Maddie and Steeleye Span to thank for my understanding of how to pronounce "yowe" (we call it a "ewe" on this side of the pond)...

The simple repeats of the rams and the yowes remind me of stranded stuff I did in the 80's...and also of Princess Diana's sheep sweater...

(Apparently this pattern was published in McCall's in 1984).

ANYWAY I am  knitting this mostly from handspun.  A couple of years ago I purchased a whole navaho-churro sheep's worth of creamy white roving from Cassie and Kurt at Little Creek Plantation here in South Carolina.  It's a LOT of roving and I wasn't sure what to do with it, especially given that it's a bit itchy next to the skin.

I have found that if I ponder my stash and think about and search for patterns, I can come up with a great combination and this is one of those. (There needs to be a name for this process of matching other than "creativity.")  My gauge is larger than called for but heck, it's a blanket, why not make it big??

Speaking of Scotland, I came upon this fabulous video at youtube.

This an an old video of croft life and sheep on Eriskay, in the Hebrides.  This provoked me to learn a little more about the Highland Clearances which despite having been to Scotland I did not learn about.

Shetland Tea Shawl

I have at long last completed my second handspun Shetland shawl.

I described the beginning of this project here.

As I mentioned, I searched for patterns that incorporated traditional Shetland lace motifs. I settled on the Shetland Tea Shawl by Dale Long, in A Gathering of Lace.

Now, to be frank, I'm not a huge fan of XRX Press and here's why  (I hope they are reading):  They produce some lovely books, but 1)I'm not a fan of oversized knitting books, hard to use  2) Too much "beauty" photography and not enough functional knitting photography.  I don't need to look at a huge lavish garden spread with a young model sporting a garment in a way that a young-ish person would never would.  And I couldn't see exactly what the center of this circular shawl looked like!

NEVERTHELESS I was really taken with the Shetland Tea Shawl.  I loved the circular construction which I had not done before.  EZ's classic circular shaping allowed me to use the different colors that I got from the yarn in concentric circles which made sense to me.  I did not do the border that is knitted on sideways as I knew that I was running out of yarn, went instead to the old standby Evelyn A. Clark border

O

O

7

O

∧

O

5

O

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O

3

O

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O

1

 It's upside down to the border shown below.

(Maybe one of these years I'll figure out how to use Excell to do this, or breakdown and buy the right stuff to develop and reproduce charts!)

It's really kind of a chunky throw but I really love it!

Old Shale Lace Shawl

 As I see it, there are four or so possibilities:

1) A traditional shawl pattern in a traditional yarn  ( a single breed yarn that is traditionally used with that pattern)

2) A traditional shawl pattern in a nontraditional yarn

3) A nontraditional shawl pattern in a nontraditional yarn 

4) A nontraditional shawl in a  classic single breed yarn (as might have been used in 1).

I suspect that my latest FO is an example of 2).  It's Evelyn A. Clark's Old Shale Lace Shawl, also at her website here.  We know that this is a "half hap" and that the traditional version is a (normal) hap shawl, a square with the old shale lace around the border.  While the wool (Shetland) is traditional, the dying is not, which is why I'm thinkin' this is a nontraditional yarn.  You can help me out here, I'm getting confused...

It is my handspun, about 16 wpi, made from a Shetland wool bumps from The Wool Shed in Orkney, Scotland, purchased in 2009. It's pretty scratchy but very lovely, Pam Murray was the dyer.  You know, just because the wool bump is soft doesn't mean the yarn will be.  But heck, I LOVE Pam's colors and its just the right size for over a jacket, either frontwards or backwards.

At the border I pulled out the points a bit to emphasize the pattern.  As I was blocking it, I kept thinking how enticing the old shale is, (the changing color does it justice) kind of the way the ocean is enticing...

Once again, thanks Evelyn and Sharon Miller

Old Shale

I hope my readership isn't getting tired of reading about Scotland, because I'm not tired of writing about it... When in Orkney, I bought, as I have mentioned prior, hand dyed bumps, in both North Ronaldsay and Shetland wool, dyed by Pam Murray.  I spun up the North Ronaldsay in what I could create as a laceweight, with I hope not too short runs of color. 

Pooling of color in knitting variegated yarns is an interesting phenomenon that  I don't  understand it, and I don't really like it, so it's just a chance I take in case it does...

I am not big on combining a variegated color yarn with a complex lace pattern.  I chose to do Evelyn A. Clark's Old Shale Lace Shawl.  It's a garter shawl with old shale lace at the bottom, probably with origins as a working woman's shawl.  It's not a shawl that I would  buy yarn to knit, rather, it speaks to me as what this yarn that I've created needs. It also seems appropriate to the Scottish origin of my fiber. (Plus, I'm trying to graph a shawl that I designed, which incorporates old shale, and this project is helping me on my learning curve to understand how to manipulate and chart the old shale lace.)

Old shale is an interesting lace pattern.  It involves the right leaning knit 2 together (K2) with the left leaning slip slip knit (SSK).  Here's a graph snippet

o

o

o

o

o

o

\

\

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/

/

/

 

E.g., from right to left K 2 tog 3 times, SSK 3 times, yo, k1 yo 3 times.  One could do more k2 tog/ssk/yo's to make wider border repeats.

For most of my life, I've been a slob, and anytime I needed to knit two stitches together, I knit 2 together thru the back loops (K2 tog TBL), just because it's easy and fast.  I am trying to rehabilitate myself from this sloppy habit, pay attention, and take a little more time.  With old shale, this is important to get the stitches leaning the correct way in to the yarn overs.

I often lose or gain stitches with this lace and I don't often frog back to fix it (yeah sloppy here too, but I can get lost in the frogging), but if I get lost, I look for the center stitch in the yarn over section, shown here with the top yellow headed pin, to reorient myself:

This center stitch goes straight up which makes it easy to find.

Evelyn says that this is a good beginner lace pattern;  I'm not so sure.  A novice knitter friend of mine tried it and gave up.  I find it can be difficult.

FYI, Liz Lovick does a very nice job of explicating old shale versus fan and feather at her blog, here.  Liz says that "old shale" is really "old shell" but acquired the name "shale" as that's how Shetlander's pronounce it.  So now you can pronounce "shell" like a Shetlander.  And you can add "peerie" with a rolled "r" and say "little shell"  "peerie shale"!  (OK, OK it's an in-joke).

Hap Shawl Magnum Opus

In Brenda's Cast-On Episode 77, she discusses one's magnum knitting opus.  I didn't think that this shawl was until I heard her postcast, and now I know that it is. I did a prior post on this here, way back in June 2010 right after I started blogging. I finished this yesterday.

To recap a bit, when in Shetland I bought Shetland Supreme top at Shetland Wool Brokers, aka Jamieson and Smith.  I purchased 500 g of natural, and 25 g bumps of  mid gray, moorit, dark chocolate and light brown.  The colors are sheep colors.   I spun it up in to double ply, at about 11 wpi. I believe I started the spinning for this almost after getting home, perhaps August of 2009. I am not good at keeping track of how I'm spinning but it turned out fairly consistent.

The basic directions for this are in Sharon Miller's lovely book, Shetland Hap Shawls Now and Then.  I graphed up a  cat's paw lace pattern for the center square, which is knit as a diamond.  The pattern for this is available under "free patterns" in the sidebar.  Gauge is about 4 stitches per inch blocked.

The center diamond was a "car project," meaning that the knitting is not so hard that I can't carry it around in case I have a few minutes free during my work day, much of which is spent in the car, between seeing home care patients.  Cat's paws on the cat's paws lace:

Once the center was done, this was no longer a car project, as it involved serious lace.  It was November.  I picked up the stitches at the sides for the fan and feather border at a ratio of one stitch per row.  This was a mistake.  My impulsive streak had taken over.  I knit the whole border than did a light block with the iron and it sagged terribly in the middle.  So, I frogged the whole thing and checked the book, and discovered that my ratio on the diagonal should have been 5 stitches to 4 rows.  It's taken another 2 months to finish it. I used the four row fan and feather from Shetland Hap Shawls Then and Now.

Yes, it's missing the lace border.  Perhaps I'll do one someday.

I love the idea of knitting something that has been done long ago.  Of course, this shawl uses a different technique from the traditional, as I used a circular needle.  Per Sharon Miller, these were only available starting in the 1920's to 40's.

Other things I really like about it:  it's a single sheep breed project, uses the actual sheep breed that would be traditionally used, and it's a sheep to shawl, as it were.

Fair Isle Knitting

I haven't been to Fair Isle, just seen it in the distance from North Ronaldsay.  Here's a map showing the location of Fair Isle.

Fair Isle is part of Shetland, located 27 miles southwest of Sumburgh Head on the mainland of Shetland, and 27 miles northeast of North Ronaldsay, part of Orkney. 

Here's a photo I took at Sumburgh Head in Shetland, you can see the puffins, they are as cute as their name sounds

I don't know why this tiny island gave its name to the Fair Isle style of knitting.  I prefer to use the term  "Fair Isle" to this traditional style of colorwork of Scotland, and use the term "stranded colorwork" to refer to anything else.  It bothers me to see the term used for all colorwork styles.  However, there is so much culture passed along shipping routes;  see how close to Norway Shetland is...

Here's a sweater done in traditional Shetland colors, with a minimum of natural dying

I purchased Alice Starmore's famous book a long time ago;  Alice also speculates in the book on why this teeny island gave its name to such a tour de force of style

This book has recently been reissued by Dover Publications in 2009;  mine was published in 1988 by Taunton Press.

I think the only Alice Starmore pattern that I have done is a favorite, "Square Dance" 

I'm sure I did it in Alice's Alice Starmore Scottish Campion. (A campion, BTW, is a flower in the family known as "pinks" or "carnations").  My sons wore this sweater and it now hangs in my nephew's closet.  This is from Stillwater;  so why did I trash my copy as it now goes for $70 new on Amazon??

 I knit this vest below, now an old chestnut, but can no longer recall where the pattern came from;  I may have found a vest pattern and put it together with the classic peerie patterns, but I can't find either source in my book collection. "Peerie"  means "small" in Shetland dialect but I also heard it used in Orkney;  it also refers to the repeat in a Fair Isle pattern.

The yarn is a Green Mountain Spinnery single ply fingering weight that no longer exists.  I might wear this tomorrow to keep me warm,  it's cold here this month...