Colourful Skeins

We had a huge skein-painting day last week. We're always so enchanted when the painted skeins are all done, dried, and twisted. They're so very lovely. Every time. They still need to be labelled, and many of them will go into knitting kits. They'll be available shortly, only at the Silk Weaving Studio, as soon as we can get all this stuff done!

Knit Swatches

The Sanjo Silk yarns always look lovely on the cones and in skeins. But fibre artists justifiably want to know what they look like when they're made into something. So we create handknitted swatches of most of our yarns just so people can touch them and see how gorgeous they look.  Each one is handknitted, then blocked, and then it's photographed (for the Sanjo Silk website), and taken to the studio to display alongside the yarn.

Here you'll see a few really lovely yarns in action. Top left is a silk/alpaca; this is the closest thing we have to a "100-Mile Yarn". The alpaca is from Salt Spring Island, and the yarn is spun on Vancouver Island. Both of these places are within 25 miles of Vancouver.

Top right is Fluffy Dots. This yarn is gaining fame because of it's wonderful, quirky texture.

Lower left: Silk Gima, which is a flat yarn consisting of several finer, somewhat firm yarns loosely adhered. As you work with this yarn, the finer yarns sometimes separate, sometimes don't, giving it an intriguing look.

Bottom right: one of our favourites. It's a 15/2 tussah that we use in weaving all the time. It's stunning when it's machine knit. And here, you can see that it's also stunning handknit.

Knitters discover our Noil Fleck

Wind, wind, wind. We sold this yarn, 20-090, like crazy at Knit City. Frankly, this was a surprise. It's not a yarn we considered to be a knitting yarn. But it's superbly beautiful, a fact that knitters didn't ignore. They told us they would be knitting it into open, lacework overlayers. They told us they would be pairing it with mohair, noil and other yarns to create the perfect texture. They told us they would be looking and waiting to see what inspired them with such a yarn. So we've been spending some time winding skeins of this luscious yarn to replenish the empty space that it once occupied. We at Sanjo have always loved this yarn, so it's delightful to see that others love it too.