Good morning and happy Friday to you! This week, I wanted to show you the new Be My Valentine colorway and a few others, and I also wanted to tell you about Splendid Sock.

Valentine Yarn

Every year, Valentine’s Day sneaks up on me, so I never think of making a Valentine’s Day colorway until it’s too late. This year, though, I actually thought of it with some time to spare, so here is Be My Valentine:

The Alpaca Lace Cloud would be great on its own but even better held double with Splendid Sock.

I also made more Elation on the same yarn bases, and Be My Valentine would go beautifully with it. Here they are together:

The Making of Be My Valentine

Now, not only did I make Be My Valentine, but I decided in what may have been a moment of insanity to make a video about it too so you could see some of the dye process. This was my first attempt at video editing, and it’s not as polished as I would like, but I decided (gulp) to share it with you anyway.

Before the section that you see here, I had started by adding Rosy-Fingered Dawn to the dye bath, and afterwards, I dyed the second side and added speckles.

If you put together Burgundy Rose, Be My Valentine and Elation, you have the makings of a great 3-skein shawl. In fact, I did a little search on Ravelry, and I found a pattern that would work wonderfully for those three colorways together. It’s called Yarn Shop Valentine. Here is the knit version, and here is the crochet version. The shawl is a really intriguing shape.

Splendid Sock

As I have mentioned a few times, yarn is the new toilet paper. You really have to have lived through 2020 for that sentence to make any sense, don’t you?

Most recently, Sock Perfection has been out of stock with my wholesaler, so I found Splendid Sock from my other wholesaler. I figure that between the two, I should always be able to keep you in sock yarn.

You may be wondering what the differences are between them. Sock Perfection is made of 80% extra-soft superwash merino and 20% nylon. It’s a 4-ply yarn that’s just good and solid and nicely soft too. In fact, I recently had a customer comment that she had had to restart a project a bunch of times and was really pleased because it didn’t split at all in spite of that.

Splendid Sock is made of 75% superwash merino and 25% nylon. It’s not quite as soft, but it’s still soft. Since it has a little more nylon and a similar twist, it’s probably even better for actual socks, but both are great for every type of project from head to toe. They are both good for warp yarn too.

My opinion is that the two yarn bases can be used interchangeably, and even if you use both in the same project, you aren’t likely to notice the difference between them.

Given their similarities, I decided to put them in the same new yarn collection in my shop, and my plan is to dye up colorways in one or the other so you’ll have the widest variety of colorways.

Here are some other colorways I dyed up this week on Splendid Sock:

As you can see, I’m getting started on spring colorways, including Ball at Netherfield and Bouquet with more to come.

I have some new colorways on Squoosh DK as well, and I am currently soaking a lusciously soft tawny colored top made of 50% baby camel down and 50% tussah silk. I’ll be dyeing that up tomorrow to go in my Hand-Dyed Top collection. On Saturday I will get started dyeing up January’s club colorways, inspired by Degas’ painting called, “Waiting.”

As always, you can find the new items in the New This Month section of my shop. I hope you find something you love.

Until next week, happy fiber artistry!