The West at Heart Hat and Mittens set, designed by Varian Brandon of Brandon Knitting Designs, is a lovely Fair Isle pattern that you can make in a variety of colorways. Knit from Mountain Meadow Wool Cody, a 2-ply merino sport weight wool, the pattern and yarn are being sold separately so that you can experience the most creativity in choosing which colorways and patterns you’d like to knit.

The combination hat and mitten pattern is available for $10, but each pattern can also be purchased separately for $6 each.

Yarn:
Mittens or Hat only, 1 skein of each color = 2 skeins
Mittens and Hat, 2 skeins main color, 1 of contrast = 3 skeins

Needles:
US 3 and 4 or size to obtain gauge.

Click here to purchase your West at Heart kit now.

All of our semi-solid colorways are available for this pattern, and can be purchased from Serendipity Yarn and Gifts online or over the phone. Above is a pictorial color chart so you can see which colors would best suit your needs.

Varian Brandon is a wonderful designer and we are so pleased to be working with her on this project. She loves Fair Isle and Aran designs and say that “Fair Isle is like painting with yarn and the textures created in Aran designs are so much fun!” Brandon has taken classes with both Alice Starmore and Kaffe Fassette, so she says that you can see where her love of color comes from. She runs a knitting and quilting retreat in the mountains of North Carolina every January and spends her free time simply having fun with needles and yarn the rest of the year.

To increase awareness about heart disease in women, Jimmy Beans Wool, a leading online retailer of yarn and fabric, created Stitch Red, and this high-profile campaign brings together retailers and manufacturers throughout the NeedleArts industry. We are proud members of the Stitch Red movement and have created “Heartbeat” yarn to help spread the word about the prevalence of heart disease in women.

The Heartbeat colorway is dyed on our exquisite Mountain Meadow Wool Aladdin yarn, which is a blend of 55 percent mountain merino and 45 percent silk. This bulky weight, 136 yard skein of yarn has the softness of merino and the sparkle of silk with a red twist!  The wool is from the Camino Ranch in Wyoming. Five percent of gross profits from the sale of this yarn go to benefit the FNIH in support of The Heart Truth.

Unique to the outdoor industry, Dohm’s knit hats are made by hand with an antique knitting machine in the United States, allowing for suburb and detailed craftsmanship. Icebox Knitting’s Dohm knit hats are made from wool, one of the most widely used renewable and sustainable natural fibers. Nearly impossible to synthesize, the wool fiber is both resilient and elastic that shapes itself perfectly to your head while providing excellent UV protection. Dohm knit hats help retain warmth in the coldest conditions while allowing you to get noticed for style.

Icebox Knitting has been designing and manufacturing hats and accessories since 1994. Icebox Knitting is a family-owned business that is passionate about implementing procedures that reduce the impact of the environment and creating products that are sustainably fun. Icebox knitting was named Top 40 Innovator 2009 in Apparel Magazine and Best of Boulder in 2009, 2010 Hat and Accessories and has been featured in other magazines such as Backpacker and Western Snowsports.

We have Dohm Hats knit with Mountain Meadow Wool available in other styles on our website for purchase. The styles range from beanies to brimmed hats and you can easily call for style availability. Check them out!

Johnny Vasquez interviewing Valerie

While we were at the National NeedleArts Association (TNNA)  trade show last month, Valerie was interviewed by Johnny Vasquez of Fiberstory.tv. If you haven’t heard of Fiberstory.tv before, it’s an online interview show where the host, Johnny, gives people working in the fiber arts industry a place to tell their story. Whether its a local yarn store owner, a famous knitwear designer, or a crochet magazine editor, their interviews find out what is behind the passion guests have for all things fiber. All of their videos can be found on their YouTube channel, or you can check out the free podcast audio version of the interviews at iTunes. Enjoy the video and see if you can catch a glimpse of Karen in the background filling orders!

Saturday morning dawned bright and cheerful and we were there in the booth, ready for action! We thought we looked pretty snazzy that morning too as the show floor opened and eager LYS owners, designers and potential customers flooded the room.

The booth looked great (if we do say so ourselves) and we really are enjoying the new Wheel of Color display for all of our artisan hand dyed yarns. If you  have only seen Mountain Meadow yarns in neutrals and naturals so far, you don’t know what you’re missing, because we love playing with the dye pots too!

The Wheel(s) of Color

We had a great time seeing friends and indie dyers who’ve used our services, like Catherine Petitti of Red Barn Yarn in Pasadena, California. She was there in her very own booth, and we were thrilled to see all of her gorgeous handpainting skills on display. Catherine has had  great success dyeing up Mountain Meadow Wool Powder River, and was tickled to show it off to us.

Catherine is as cute as a button!

We were thrilled to be able to preview two amazing designs (Drumlin Enclose and Moraine Surround) by an indie designer who just happens to be our yarn representative too! Andrea Marquis is such a cheerful person (as you can image, we all rub along well) and her designs are really stunning. We’re just so happy she decided to use our yarns! They’ve now been released to the public online, so you’ll have to check out these two fabulous knitwear pieces. Here is Drumlin Enclose, pictures below:

Drumlin Enclose

TNNA wasn’t just all fun and games, though. We aren’t just pretty faces (hey, speak for yourself!) and we are hard at work (on a super-special project that we’ll be telling you more about soon), and so we had a sit-down interview in the booth to talk about why we get to play with fiber all day. And make jokes that crack each other up.

We crack each other up.

We were also very pleased to have designers Cat Bordhi and Kristin Omdahl stop by the booth as well. Check out this photo of Cat below as she demonstrates a particular knitting technique with some of our yarn. Isn’t she just luminous?

Cat demonstrates with her knitting

Sometimes we have to pinch ourselves because we just feel so lucky to be able to do something we love and make a positive impact in others. It’s great being able to attend events like TNNA and share with others the importance of agricultural sustainability and ecological innovation in the US. Thank you all for supporting everything that we do!

Lots of love,

Valerie and Karen

The yurt is a very cool lattice-walled structure – it can be warm in the deep cold, yet cool in summer. A ger (rhymes with “air”), as the Mongolians prefer to call it, is much more than a tent. The yurt has an aerodynamic shape so the wind slips over the structure with minimal resistance. The structure can collapse small enough to fit on one draft animal and can be set up again in a half an hour.  It is a self-supporting building; the frame holds its shape with no help from ropes or a stretched cover, and in all but the strongest winds the yurt will stand with nothing but gravity attaching it to the ground! According to the great Woodland Yurts website,  this rigidity is maintained by opposing forces exerted by different parts of the frame.  It really is an ingenious design.

What I find so interesting about the yurt is how it grew naturally out of the environment the Turkic nomads lived in. They had very little wood, so they built their shelters out of saplings and used fiber from their herd animals – yak, sheep, goats and camels – to make a warm and comfortable living space for themselves. The original word for “nomad” came from a word for felt, making the nomads “felt people.” The felt people’s shelters enabled them to live sustainably in harsh climates, to move easily with their herds, and raise their families in a manner that was simple, comfortable and in balance with the world around them.

Kristen and John have partially set their yurt up in the mill and it will be set up permanently in Montana. It is all hand done and they have made sheets of wool felt that will cover the sides and the roof for insulation and then a canvas cover goes over that. Valerie’s family and my family all helped on the construction, and we had a ton of fun while we did it!

We’ve also been hard at work spinning up loads of new yarn. The over-flashed bit at the very front is even more yarn that has been skeined up and is piled high on a table and waiting to be tagged. It just all looks so impressive when we lay it all out that we wanted to share a picture with you so you could see the yarn in all of its natural glory!

These professionally filmed Stitch-Alongs, demonstrates 18 of Barbara Walker’s beautiful stitch patterns and include an interview from Barbara Walker, and an eBook with 5 project patterns. Best of all, the videos are now available for individual purchase!

To preview the amazing quality of these videos, take a look at the How to Knit Florentine Freeze Stitch-Along from the Barbara Walker videos, which features Mountain Meadow Wool. Videos are how I learn new knitting tricks much of the time, what about you?

Guess what we did today!

We are at the Wyoming Business Alliance/Wyoming Heritage Foundation’s annual business forum in Casper, Wyoming, where we were one of the 21 Wyoming companies honored this year for “succeeding in this challenging economic climate.”

We were so nervous this morning but we gave a great presentation talking about why we love wool, our ranchers, and our happy and loyal customers who are helping us work toward ecological-izing the way we mill wool (Ha, I think I just made up a word). Whew! Now we just get to sit back and relax for the rest of the event! The video footage of our presentation is up online, so we even get to share that with you!

We start at 24:30 minutes in, so just slide the bar over to that point and start. Click the link below to go see the video!

Video of Today’s Presentation

Also, I just found this article that was written about our time spent at the Governor’s Business Forum. They said some very nice things about us!