Nutty

These yarns are driving me batty. They are sticky and clingy and get all knotted up together.  The unworked yarn hugs the working yarn and piles up alongside, forming this mass of twisted loops.  

 They cling and they twist and every second yarn switch, I have to take a few minutes and untwist , untangle and unloop.  I have even tried to put the balls on separate sides of me, but they seem to reach out and grab on to one another.  It is as if they were meant to be.  For all the grabbiness, I love working with these yarns.  There is just something about Noro in combination with other yarns.

I have combined Noro with other yarns before and earlier this evening, was contemplating those combinations and how successful they were.

I combined Noro Silver Thaw with Custom Woollen Mills two ply Mule Spinner and it made a really great sweater, one that feels so warm and cozy while looking all business like. 

Silver Thaw is a wool, angora and nylon blend and the Custom Woollen Mills a pure prairie wool.  They work well together because both have a very homespun feel to them.  It is part of the charm of this sweater. 

It was great in my chilly office in summer, which is what this sweater was designed for, but now the lack of slightly longer sleeves means it gets worn a little less often than some others. I do have some of the discontinued Noro yarn left, 

but at this point, I might be better off using it to make another sweater.  I know I can get the Custom Woollen Mills Mule Spinner easily, but I also have some Berocco Remix that might be a really interesting, and I think, successful combination.  It starts as a colour choice, but the Remix has a sturdy sort of character.  There is something earthy in the way it wears and performs that might work well with this leftover Noro.  I have a gut feeling about it.  

I also combined a bulky Noro silk, cotton and wool blend, Karuta with Rowan Pure Wool Worsted, a superwash, of all things. I fell for the inimitable colour combination I could get using these 2 yarns together.   It shouldn't have worked and would never have been recommended by a yarn store, but it worked. 

It worked and worked well because the entire yoke of the sweater is in one yarn, the Karuta, and the entire body is in the Pure Wool Worsted.  The gauge difference, from 4 stitches to the inch, to 5 stitches to the inch, between the two yarns, was managed because of that construction.  When the Karuta yoke was done, all I did was add another round of increases to get to the number of stitches I needed for the Pure Wool. It worked perfectly, no odd stitches, no fudging. I doubt that it would ever happen so perfectly again but oh my, it was magical.  It is the sweater I am most likely to get compliments on. Oddly enough, I don't have any photos of the finished project.  It went to wear immediately after finishing!

That the Noro looks so good and is working so well with the Briggs and Little Regal is no surprise to me.  

When I first picked up this colourway at Prairie Lily In Saskatoon, she didn't think it would work.  Regal seems to be a loftier fuller kind of yarn. She felt a better choice would be Kureyon.  She is probably right that Kureyon would be a really great combination with Regal, but this works too.  

Silk Garden has a slightly different finish to it and the row gauge might be slightly different than the Regal.  The stitch gauge is the same though, and since this is knit to fit, rather than slavishly following a pattern, it works.  The Silk Garden is quite thin in some places but, I think that is part of why my winging it approach to combinations with Noro works so well for me.  Because Noro yarns are not just one thing.  They seems to be a whole bunch of things in one yarn. If you adapt to what is before you, somehow magic happens.

So if you see me doing wild things with Noro in the future, and think I am nuts, you may be right.  But nuts works for me. If nuts means I get to play with magic, I'm going for it.