Osborn Fiber Studio

If you haven’t figured it out yet (from my repeating it incessantly), the MD Sheep & Wool festival is a huge opportunity for mum & me at OFS. Thus, it seemed only right and proper to celebrate with a couple of new patterns, which are debuting this week in honor of Sheep & Wool. If you will be at the festival, you will be able to purchase either of these patterns at the Cloverhill booth, thus supporting not only indie designers yours truly, but also an awesome local yarn shop, without whose help and encouragement, this little business would not exist.

Mum’s contribution is a sweater she’s been working on for a while. On the surface, it’s a fairly easy pattern – a drop-shoulder pullover, mostly in stockinette. This makes it eminently suitable for beginners. However, it also gently introduces two more advanced techniques: beaded knitting and intarsia. This pattern requires modest but extant chart-reading skills.

We call it the Beaded Hourglass Tunic. It’s knit out of the “Kirby Woolpaca” that mom dyed, but the cuffs, collar, bottom edging, and actual hourglass shapes are knit with a new yarn we’re calling “Kirby Meritime.” (It’s 50/50 Merino/Seacell. Seacell is made from seaweed. Get the pun? It’s subtle, and most folks will probably just think we can’t spell, but we were a little punch-drunk when we named it.) Anyway, the Meritime, this lovely shiny silky worsted-weight, is right now only available in kits to make this sweater. These kits, available in red, brown, blue, and tan, include the beads and all the yarn you’ll need to make up to the 45″ size (one more skein of Woolpaca and you’ll have enough to make the 48″ size). For you machine knitters out there, instructions are also included to machine-knit this sweater on a Big Phil type machine. And at $80, the kits are a VERY good deal for the amount of yarn included.

Here’s a close-up of the fun eyelet neckline Mum dreamed up:

With time and blessing, we hope to offer Meritime separately at a later date, and to have more kits. But the pattern is also available separately on Ravelry for $7.00.

My contribution is the first of two hats in the works which is based on the rose window behind the organ at Shields Chapel in Edgeworth, where my church meets. Thus, I call this hat the Rose of Edgeworth. It takes one skein of Kirby Woolpaca (or 109 yards of any other worsted weight) and includes both written and charted directions.

Funny story: as I was standing in line at the post office on Tuesday, five minutes before they were about to close, with the last box in hand ready to ship to Cloverhill, I realized – I had the sample for this hat pattern taped inside this box. And I hadn’t taken any pictures of it. And I had to get the pattern finalized by Friday. Too flustered to do anything about it, I shipped the box away without taking the five seconds it would have taken to open the box and yank out the sample. The test-knit hat shown above hadn’t yet arrived, so I did the only logical thing I could think of: I knit another one in about 32 hours.

This one has no bobbles in the center, but the original had full bobbles. So I took the test knit and made some faux-bobbles over the popcorns added by the test knitter, so you can get the full effect of the original:

I never thought of myself as a liker of bobbles, but I think they make a fun stand-in for the quatrefoil at the center of the window.

Here’s some detail on one of the sections. It’s subtle, but I think it captures the effect.

This thoroughly-test-knit little pattern will be at Sheep & Wool, but if you aren’t anywhere near the greater DC/Baltimore area, you can get it here on Ravelry for $4.00.

If you’re tired of all this self-promotion, thanks extra bunches for reading. I will get back to knitterly naval gazing as soon as I have recovered enough brain-energy to string together any number of profound sentences.