Tag Archives: HPKY

Pattern: Snoqualmie Cowl

New pattern day!  I’m excited about this one. (Though, I suppose I’m always excited about a new pattern.)

It’s a super simple cabled cowl in the most luxurious yarn have left in your stash.  (I don’t know about you, but I have a bunch of little balls of bulky wool and alpaca that I can’t bring myself to throw away.)OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERACovered in tons of simple cables, the Snoqualmie Cowl looks way more complicated than it is.  It’s a great way to practice cable knitting and play with colors.  And because it’s knit in super-thick yarn on great big needles, it works up in about fifteen minutes (OK, that’s an exaggeration, but it does go really fast)!OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIf you want to give this cowl a shot, grab a copy of the free pattern here:

Snoqualmie Cowl

Yarn Spotlight: Rome

I don’t usually wax poetic about a specific brand of yarn.  It makes me feel like a (unpaid) corporate shill.  But in this case, this yarn is so exceptional, so weird, and so awesome that I can’t help myself.

Mom bought me a handful of  skeins of HPKY’s Rome yarn for my birthday.  And when I opened the box, I immediately put down the project I was working on to start knitting with the Rome Yarn.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIt’s incredibly fluffy and soft. Like kittens and clouds, and… I don’t know… ducklings.  It’s mostly baby alpaca and Merino, with a little bit of nylon.

At first glance, Rome looks like unspun pencil roving, but when you start working with it, you realize it’s incredibly strong and totally not split-y.  When you look closer, you see that it’s actually really cool space-aged yarn.  What they’ve done is take a super-fine nylon fiber and knit it into an I-cord.  Then, they filled the little knit tube with the alpaca and merino.  See? (It’s crazy hard to photograph, but this was the best I could do.  If you squint really hard, you can kind of see the I-cord stitching).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABecause the alpaca and merino fibers haven’t actually been spun together, your finished project ends up extra fluffy and cuddly.  I made the HPKY Bias Shawl with my Rome yarn, and it’s the warmest, most wonderful thing I’ve made in a long time.  The squishy-ness of garter stitch combined with the fluffiness of the yarn makes it unbelievably lovely.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAIf you see a skein (or two) of HPKY’s Rome, grab it up.  Even if you don’t knit with it, you can keep it around to pet like a kitten.  I wouldn’t judge.