Magazines and Yarn (=Life Is Good)!

I am totally late for this post - but I wanted to share with you the lovely amirisu winter 2015 issue that arrived early January in my mail. 
I had the incredible honour to participate with a cardigan pattern of mine, called MarlOn. 

In this lovely issue 6 you can find six other beautiful patterns, from talented designers like Hiroko Fukatsu, Bristol Ivy, Thea Colman, Amy Christoffers, Rie and Claudia Eisenkolb.
And there are great articles to read too: like a very interesting interview with Madeline Tosh's Amy Hendrix, an other one about a technique called "Weaving with Nature", a "Report" of Germany and an ongoing series explaining Japanese Patterns!

For my own cardigan I had fun playing around with the combination of two strands in sligthly different hues, to achieve something like a hand-dyed effect and to be able to gradually change the colours of the stripes, so as to enhance the different sized striping in some sections.
What interested me most while designing this piece was to try to emulate the female body shape with the use of horizontal striping and slight colour-changes.
It’s a top down seamless knit (as I like them most) and I am especially happy with how the short rows at the very top of the yoke produce larger stripes at the back while keeping them small and delicate at the front of the shoulder.

You can find the magazine here on ravelry to download digitally - or here on the amirisu shop for a “real” physical copy of the magazine (and together with this magazine version you even get a coupon for the digital one, too).
And there is a KAL just starting in the amirisu-ravelry group here! So, if you would like to have some company while knitting this pattern you can post there. I will pop in from time to time myself to answer questions and to see what everybody is knitting up.

I also have gotten quite a lot of yarn in the last month! So I would like to share some pictures of my goodies: Take a look at the beautiful hand-dyed 100% merino wool I got from Nice & Knit!!!
The small family business is producing high quality yarn for some years now and the two sisters, Kara and Katie are really passionate about everything that has to do with fibre and colour. 
Something that is immediately visible upon opening the parcel...

The yarn is incredibly soft and bouncy (just like one would expect from a perfect pure merino) and the sport weight that I have chosen, is really showing the stitches wonderfully when knitted up. Even before blocking they looked even and firm.
What I like most with this yarn is the range of hues it has: from very light and faded to extremely saturated… it’s all there in the same skein! Especially the blue colourway (Nantucket) reminds me of a loved pair of denim, that you just don’t want to take off - ever! 
The brown (Nutmeg) on the other hand is it's perfect partner, since it strengthens the blue/purple nuances and makes them even more vivid.

In my swatch I loved trying out different ways to pair the colours  (as you can see they always played nice together) and be it stripes or lace or just simple stockinette stitch, the result was always gratifying!
I do look forward to work with this yarn soon! It really is such a pleasure to feel the smooth soft strand sliding through one's fingers…

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