At the Woodsedge Fiber Festival, Dan and I had the pleasure of being located right across from Becca and her Mom of the BagSmith. After watching them demonstrate the BIGGGG knitting all weekend, I finally succumbed and purchased some size 50 !!! knitting needles. I could not imagine anything so big. But there they were and I must say I circled them for a week or so after returning home from the show, not exactly knowing what I would do with them. And then I started knitting and within a couple hours I had this shawl.

I pulled about 8 yarns from my stash - some ribbon, some boucle, some thick and thin, whatever I had - and knitted away. The needles were a little awkward at first, but after I found the position that worked for me, I was flying. What a great idea! Because of our anticipated move, we do not have a supply of these in the shop, but would be happy to special order them for you. Just email or call us.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
from all of us at Carodan Farm.
We wish you many hours of knitting pleasure over the holidays.

Baby Caroline already has a liking for yarn although not the approved use of it.

Projects in the Works

Good grief! Why haven’t I finished the Einstein Sweater? Besides being restricted to the 24 hour day, yarn keeps pouring into the shop, and I have no resistance. At some point hugging and squeezing the yarn isn’t enough and you have to get some on needles. It’s aggravating when the yarn comes in without pattern support. Can’t just pick up a ball and run with it. Araucania Aysen yarn was calling to me after doing a little sample sock from Cat Borhdi’s book for SoXperience and realizing how incredibly soft the yarn is. With a blend of merino wool, alpaca and silk, that’s exactly what you would expect. What to do, what to do? Had in my mind’s eye a side to side vest. Tried out quite a few until I settled on one called Puget Sound in Nancie Wiseman’s Classic Knitted Vests. As you can see from this photo of the pattern, it uses the same colorway in two different yarns. I tried combining other yarns with the Aysen, but was never satisfied, so decided to use only the Aysen for the entire vest. Next came the gauge and many needle sizes later, settled on the size 10 for the vest. So, you can see how it’s coming along. I think the garter stitch rows will set off the yarn nicely. After all this work I called the publisher to order copies of the book to discover it’s out of print. Big tears! But all is not lost. After some negotiations, we were given permission to make copies of the pattern. So…smiles once again.

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Hello everyone! Welcome to the Carodan Farm Blog.

We have so much information to share on knitting tips, techniques, yarns, not to mention our sheep and farm, that we decided to start our very own blog. We plan to include all that, plus the projects we are working on - knitting projects from our daughters, Sarah and Melissa, and myself, Caroline, as well as from our knitting buddies Michelle, Debbie and Gerry. You’ll see them all here along with our comments, suggestions.

New yarns and books are arriving all the time, and you’ll get news of them here before they even hit the store. Featured products will make you aware of different aspects of our store. And of course there’ll be the special coupons just for our blog audience. And last but not least, your input will round it out to perfection. We learn from each other the best. So, here we go into this new phase of Carodan Farm knitting! Hope to see you here!