Check out what’s new at Iyanough Farm this week!
Cape Cod Fiberworks @ Iyanoughfarm.com has added a whole batch of new colorways to our hand dyed knitting yarn collection. Featuring special summer colors, we’ve also added a line of organic cotton fingering in scrumptious shades of pink, blue, and sea glass green for knitting up summer accessories, beach coverups and more.
First off, we dyed up some of our favorite wool/nylon fingering sock yarn in happy shades of geranium pink and summer sky blue. These colorways are reminiscent of long, hot summer days on the Cape and Islands during the halcyon years of my childhood, the 1960s. Back then, life in the summer was slower and full of adventures.
Window boxes on stores overflowing with pink geranium flowers with a smattering of bright green leaves dotted Main Street. Occasionally, a flower would drop to the sidewalk, and my friends and I would fight over who got to stick the blossom into our hair as we cruised past on our bikes.
The whited out blue of a hot summer day’s sky reminds me of many hours spent laying on my back in a meadow near my house watching the birds fly across an endless sky while warming up after a cold swim in the neighborhood pond. After 20 minutes of resting there, making whistles from grass and talking with friends, all of us were ready to run back to the pond and jump in again. Back and forth – from pond to meadow – the sky followed us as we learned our swimming strokes, ate lunch, and shivered with blue lips until the sun broke the chill again.
The dyeing process for wool is different from that of cotton. Wool requires heat to set the dye, and hand painting has more exactitude than that of hand painted cotton. Cotton yarns must soak in a a cold alkaline bath for several hours to set the dye. Painting can produce shades of color, but the placement of the colors is much less precise, giving the finished skeins a softer and somewhat muter appearance.
Flowers, either wild or cultivated, perfume the Cape in May and June. From the prolific wild white June roses, whose buds are brilliant pink before they open and the thorny yet magnificent Rosa Rugosa that grow on the sand dues at the beach to the nodding heads of columbine on the side of the road and in my perennial garden, our new cotton colors, Beach Roses and Columbine are the result of hours of experimentation to get just the right variegated shades to match these wonderful Cape Cod colors.
The Seaglass colorway in cotton is similar in that there is variegation and striation in the mix. However, its tonal quality comes from only one dye shade rather than several. Darker in some areas, and lighter in other, Seaglass is a gorgeous reminder of days walking along the beach collecting bits of glass to save in a bowl. I told my sister they were emeralds from a pirate ship.
All Cape Cod Fiberworks cotton skeins are 100% organically grown cotton in fingering weight, ready to knit into your favorite summer accessory.
