stitch by stitch

Remember that lovely local yarn from a couple of weeks ago? Here’s where I am with that so far: The pair of socks was finished pretty quickly and I have been wearing them inside constantly ever since.

(They’re the same length, the picture just makes them look uneven).
These are honestly the warmest socks I’ve ever had, this yarn is so great. They look a bit out of shape here, but that’s only because I am wearing them all the time. And I must remember to make the shafts longer, they always come out too short.

Two skeins of the chunky mustard yellow yarn went into this cowl. This was almost exclusively a ‘bus project’, knit on the 30 min. bus ride to and from work, so it took me quite some time to finish it.

I will probably need to wash this once to soften it up a bit, but I love love love how it turned out, I really can’t get enough of that colour.

I am already on to the next pair of socks in a color to match the cowl, though from a different yarn this time. I’d love to find some less chunky sock yarn in the same quality, it’s bugging me that nice yarn is so hard to find. Come summer there will be craft fairs all around though and I hope to get some pretty colored sock yarn there. Also I’m already scouring Etsy like crazy.

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local yarn

Inspired by some blog posts about buying yarn from local farms and also after reading articles about the cruel treatment of sheep in the countries that most of our yarn comes from, I decided to start knitting with yarn from local sheep.
After all, even though I live in a very industrialized area, even here I see tons of sheep happily grazing on the banks of the river Rhine all the time. So there must be lots of yarn from those sheep that I could buy right?
Wrong. After doing some internet research I found out that german sheep are kept for the meat only and shearing them is expensive, though necessary. It would apparently be way too expensive to process the wool here, so it is usually burned or otherwise destroyed.
???
We have lots and lots of sheep here and instead of processing the wool that is here we burn it and import yarn from the other end of the world? Sometimes you can only shake your head at the world we live in.
Nevertheless, there are few select shops that sell local yarn and I ordered a big batch from Finkhof, a shepherding community in southern Germany that has been going strong for over 30 years.

Their yarn is 100% local sheep wool which retains a lot of the good qualities that industrial yarn lacks (such as natural grease content). There a a couple of undyed natural colors and I also got a couple of dyed mustard yellow skeins as well. Paradoxically, these skeins were also a lot cheaper than storebought yarns.

The yarn is pretty rough and scratchy to the touch, but once knit up it actually doesn’t feel scratchy to the skin at all, just cozy and very very warm. After the first wash it is supposed to really soften up as well.

The first thing I’m knitting with it is socks of course, with my new rosewood needles. I can’t wait to wear them inside on winter weekends (we’ve just had our first heavy snow yesterday and it is going to go well below 0°C even in the day in the next couple of weeks).
Like a friend has said recently “If you are taking the trouble and the time to make something yourself, might as well do it properly and with the best quality, organic ingredients”. I find myself more and more looking beyond the rim of consumerism and trying to trace back where my food, yarn and household products come from and for me, that is a very good place to go.