May Day update
Dear friends,
It’s been far too long, but San Juan Woolworks is alive and well and ready to open its doors for a shop update this weekend! I took our little driftwood yarn tree, a new hanging rack made specially by my father, a chest full of samples, and a Toyota Tacoma full of yarn down to Bellevue to join my friend Emily Tzeng of Local Color Farm and Fiber at Vogue Knitting Live earlier this month. But thanks to the team at Abundant Earth Fiber, we have more stock available to offer online. So, the details:
What’s in the update?
1) Spyhop! The black coffee, dark chocolate, molasses brown skeins with the little glints of silver marled through in the third ply are back. These are special because we can only make them from the black fleeces grown by the Finn x BFLx lambs in their first year. Almost all of these animals start to turn stormy grey and later silver after their second summer. (There are a few exceptions, because Finns do come in a black that lasts into adulthood, and a few of the lambs seem to have inherited this color pattern.) At that point, they contribute to our new color of Spyhop, which is a mid-grey heather. It has both warm and cool tones and it’s beautiful.
I’m hoping to run a white-based marl with little streaks of golden brown in it from the brown and honey badger Finn lambs, but that will be for Fall or Winter if Lydia can bring my vision into being. So for now, it’s dark marl or grey heather. Both are DK weight, 3-ply yarns in 100 g skeins. The grey heather is 250 yards and the dark marl is 240. We have sweater quantities of both, and I’m not committing the entire stock to this update, so if you miss out, don’t despair.
2) Selkie is back! The first run of this 2-ply sport weight yarn from our BFLx ewes sold out quickly, but good news: we have more sheep now. (So many more sheep. The flock has been busy during the pandemic, let me tell you.) This batch of Selkie is all silver grey. I just finished a Waiting for Rain shawl (Sylvia McFadden’s pattern) in it; I also knit up an ‘Aina sweater holding a strand of Selkie together with a strand of Mighty Mo silk/mohair laceweight from the Farmer’s Daughter Fiber, and I highly recommend you do the same. I knit this sweater on US #9 needles and only needed two skeins of each in my size. I can wear this garment over a tank top and it doesn’t itch in the slightest; it’s just light and warm and snuggly and elegant. We put it on Emily’s mannequin torso at our VKL booth and it got a lot of attention. (Get the pattern on Ravelry from Leila Raven!) I used a similar neutral color, but the grey is so versatile you could hold it together with almost any hue and get a really pleasing effect. Selkie comes in 100 g skeins with a 320-yard put-up.
3) Haven, our DK/light worsted North Country Cheviot 3-ply, is available in a whole bunch of colors I’ve dyed with plants from our garden, orchards, compost, and hedgerows over the past couple of winters. Want to play with fades? I have whole runs of pinky browns, yellows, and peachy russets. You can color block practically any botanical dyes to pleasing effect—they all go together. I have sweater quantities of a few hues in the pink family. My dye pot size and kitchen stove set-up limits my batches to five or six skeins, which I recognize is problematic for folks who need more yardage, but avocado and madder both produced repeatable colors in my pot this winter. I’ve numbered the lots for transparency, but Dawn 1 and Dawn 2 are practically indistinguishable, and so are Robin 1 and Robin 2, so there’s an opportunity to grab enough for a larger garment by blending the lots. You can get a shawl or a vest out of a number of the other colors in this update, too.
If your skin is too sensitive to wear a medium wool like Cheviot near your neck, or if you want to just test drive a single skein, I’ve published a new fingerless mitt pattern to support this yarn. It’s called Haven mitts, and you can find it on Ravelry—or just send me an email if that site isn’t accessible for you and we’ll make it happen. Haven comes in 200 yard skeins, and it’s available in natural white as well for classic Aran or gansey-type garments.
When is the update?
I’m going with May 1 at 2pm PST. This week I’ll be sharing some photos of the available yarns on Instagram @sanjuanwoolworks, so you’ll have a chance to see more of the colors in advance.
Fair warning: I raised the prices.
Undyed skeins of Selkie and Haven are $28; dyed skeins are $32. Spyhop is $30. I really want to keep our yarns affordable, but hay is expected to double in price this year due to the western drought, and farming on an island you can only reach by ferry is very expensive as it is. Did I mention we have a lot of sheep to feed? We are being creative about grazing them off-farm to help landowners reduce fuel loads, save on mowing, and replenish spent soils, but during the winter they all have to come home to shelter on dry ground as much as possible. And at that point they need hay that we either purchase or put up ourselves (with expensive equipment and expensive fuel and lots of sweat and toil). So every skein we can sell at a fair price helps.
Thanks for your continued support and for your patience in waiting so long for this update! I hope we can get you what you want on Sunday!