This week I thought I would give you a peak into the process of creating a new yarn collection. About six weeks ago now, I decided I wanted to make a new yarn collection based on the characters in Jane Austen’s wonderful novels.

The first step was to decide on a yarn base. I’ve been wanting to add a couple new bases to my regular line, so this was the perfect opportunity to do that too. I narrowed down the list from hundreds to 7 and ordered 7 sample skeins. My poor family must have thought I had lost my mind given how much time and effort and research went into choosing a base, but my goal is to have a fairly small number of bases that I use all the time so you guys know what to expect. Every base in my shop needs to be well made and very soft.

I wanted a laceweight base for spring and summer and a more luxurious fingering-weight base as well. Eventually, I chose a 70% merino/20% silk/10% cashmere for the fingering-weight base and a lace-weight base made of 75% merino, 20% silk, and 5% stellina. It’s a heavier lace at 875 yards per skein, which I like because it’s still lovely but less delicate than the really thin stuff. I’ve already put this yarn to the test, reskeining it, hanging it to dye, and hanging it to dry, and there haven’t been any breaks.

Anyway, I wanted to make the Jane Austen collection the laceweight yarn because, well, Jane Austen and lace seem like a good match to me. As I write this, I’m thinking of Mr. Bennet protesting while Mrs. Bennet tried to describe the lace Mr. Bingley’s sisters were wearing in Pride and Prejudice:

“Oh! my dear,” continued Mrs. Bennet, “I am quite delighted with him. He is so excessively handsome! and his sisters are charming women. I never in my life saw any thing more elegant than their dresses. I dare say the lace upon Mrs. Hurst’s gown –”

Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against any description of finery. She was therefore obliged to seek another branch of the subject, and related, with much bitterness of spirit and some exaggeration, the shocking rudeness of Mr. Darcy.

While I was waiting for the yarn to arrive, I worked on the colorways.

I started by thinking about the characters of all my favorite Jane Austen characters. While I love the A & E movies, I was thinking more about the books. If I knew I were going to be stuck on a deserted island and could choose just three authors’ works to bring with me, Jane Austen would be one of the three. In my opinion, few authors have ever been as brilliant at understanding human character and portraying it so delightfully as Austen.

Lizzie, my all-time favorite, is bold and cheerful but also sensitive and romantic in her own way. I included yellow for cheerfulness, mint green for hope, lavender for romance, and a beautiful shade of pink for femininity. Her older sister, Jane, is kind and gentle and perhaps the most truly virtuous character Austen ever wrote. I made her blue for kindness, white for virtue, gray for her melancholy, and pink for femininity. Ann from Persuasion begins as a capable character but one who has lost her hope and joy, so half of the Ann skeins are gray, and the other half has green for hope, blue for kindness, pink for femininity, and lavender for romance. I won’t go through each of the seven characters, but you get the idea. A lot of thought went into each character, and then there was the more practical consideration that I wanted each colorways within the collection to match every other colorway, so I had to limit the colors to a reasonable number.

After I worked out the general colors, it was time to practice. It took a few tries to get just the right dye colors. I mostly use primaries plus black and brown and mix my own. I have my standard mixtures, but I needed something different for a few of the Jane Austen colors. I made a custom blue dye mix, a softer yellow than I usually use, and a mint green that took awhile to perfect.

I took a worsted-weight skein I had on hand and split it into 10 gram mini skeins and tried out all my “characters” on it. I had originally planned to use my swirl method–a method where I dye each skein in a pot and then add swirls of different colors. However, I wasn’t really satisfied with the way this turned out. I wanted bright and clear skeins, and the colors were rather muddy, so I decided to use a different method for these skeins. I used a method that involves a whole lot of math–ratios and proportions and percentages, oh my. That’s okay. That’s what spreadsheets are for!

I actually went through 2 sets of several characters and 3 sets of Lizzie, because Lizzie, being my own favorite, had to be perfect. Here are the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd versions of Lizzie from left to right:

The first time, the colors were muddy. The second time, I wasn’t taken into consideration the in-between colors that happen when two dyes meet. You can see my note where I wrote “meh” on the 2nd one. I felt like I finally got it the way I wanted on the third try. Third try is a charm, right?

Several other skeins went through a couple tries as well. Here is Ann–dependable, kind, capable, an excellent listener but melancholic due to still loving Captain Wentworth after refusing him so many years before. The skein on the left was my first try. Again I used the “swirl” method but decided the colors were too muddy. The skein on the right was the one I thought was much improved.

Here’s Marianne, the ultimate romantic. I was actually reasonably happy with the one on the left, but I think the one on the right was much better, don’t you?

Each one came out in lovely, clear pastels, but I wanted something richer, so I glazed them all. Here are all the sample skeins together after glazing. FYI, the bright green and orange yarns are just acrylic yarns I used as ties.

Finally, the “real” skeins arrived. I actually decided to cut all my previous dye formulas in half, using 50% of the dye I had used with the worsted-weight merino yarn to account for the fact that there is less middle in laceweight than worsted and the fact that a merino/silk blend would probably takes up the dye more brilliantly than the 100% merino I had practiced on. You can always add more dye, but you can’t take it away. I’m so glad I did. The colors were just right at 50%.

I spent yesterday and today adding ties and zip ties to each skein, grouping them in sets of 4, mixing dyes, and dyeing the yarn in giant stock pots on my stove.

 

Now all 28 skeins are drying on the bar on the back porch. Here they are:

 

I love looking out the kitchen window and seeing this. Now, they all look like nice pastels right now, but I haven’t glazed them yet. That’s the final step to take them from just nice pastel yarn to rich, deep colors worthy of Jane Austen’s characters, and I’ll be doing it tomorrow morning.

I am hoping to have these in the shop by sometime next week. I did make sample skeins of all but Emma, so hopefully I will find some time to knit up some samples of each of the other colorways.

I was a little hesitant to share the good, bad, and the ugly with you, but I thought some of you might enjoy seeing a behind-the-scenes view of what goes into creating a new collection. Let me know what you think, and if you have any favorite lace patterns for knitting or crochet, I’d love to share them with everyone.

Happy fiber artistry!