Taking My Time with Swift Yarns
“I’ll stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.”
Carolyn of Swift Yarns describes herself and her yarns as fun, chic, and happy (“I love being like my yarns!”) and her attitude toward her product and life in general couldn’t be more refreshing. And couldn’t be more unlike our favorite goth girl, Wednesday Addams (who did say the above quote.) Carolyn effuses unabashed self-acceptance along with bright and bold colors…and I can’t help but feel her positive attitude is hard won and all the more meaningful for it.
I love people like that.
I’m feeling this fun irony as I’m knitting with a moody, dark yarn created by such a bright and friendly human. The yarn is the deepest burgundy toned brought down even deeper with black, dyed on Carolyn’s MCN base, Swift Bliss. “I thought [Wednesday] might want to wear this color,” says Carolyn. And hence the name of the colorway.
‘Wednesday’ was one of her first colorways, part of a set of six tonals, and Carolyn says it’s one of her most popular ones. She has kept all six in the lineup, and “could almost quit making any of the others and just make ‘Wednesday’ everyday, it’s that much of a favorite for everyone…
"But it’s not good for the creativity to do one thing everyday.”
Since then, Carolyn has embraced the speckles and now, most of her work features these trendy pops of color. “I just made a new colorway today and I remember looking at the pot and really loving how speckles can tie a whole range of colors together.”
I will always make tonals but speckles are here to stay for me.
—Carolyn of Swift Yarns
One of her early speckled colorways (and evidently, her personal favorite!), ‘Cherry Blossom,’ inspired the look of Carolyn’s logo. Yes, I’d say she’s committed to the speckles! “Swift Yarns,” she says, is a play on the word swift, which is both a tool of fiber craft as well as a species of bird, which represents the ultimate freedom of flight: “creating colors is definitely a form of personal freedom.” She also enjoys the irony that “there is nothing swift about our craft!”
Carolyn lives and dyes (Wednesday Addams would love that phrase) in Queens, New York, and despite living in such a large city, didn’t have an easily-accessible local yarn store when she became interested in hand-dyed yarn. (At least not with the children in tow.) Since she wanted to be able to see the yarn in person before buying it, she decided to start dyeing her own.
Isn’t that a testament to motherhood? It’s just easier to set up a dye studio in your home and make your own damn yarn than shop with littles. Truth.
Carolyn says she works out of a very small basement space, but can get a lot accomplished there. “The other day I was packing my yarns up for a show and I couldn’t believe how much I had done in such a small space! Just goes to show if you want to do something bad enough nothing will stop you!” Small space also keeps her efficient in her photography process. Coming to fibertography from her background as an architect, Carolyn has excellent attention to details of line and form. Though she says she has “little space to change things up,” I find that her Instagram feed has tons of variety! (Constraint can be great for creativity, by the way; as you work around self-imposed limits, you start to learn how much you really are capable of.)
With five years of dyeing experience, Carolyn has settled into knowing what works and what doesn’t. She says she loves to keep dyeing an adventure, but she’s developed an intuition for predicting how the dyes will combine. Sometimes she just knows, and sometimes she needs to knit a swatch to see if she “needs more or less of something…
And there are times I know right away I created a mess!”
I always say I’m a knitter first. I approach my knitting as if the yarns aren’t mine. It’s a good way to determine if I have some gaps in my color selection.
—Carolyn of Swift Yarns
So, when the dyeing’s done, how does Carolyn put yarn to pattern? She told me that a couple of her favorite projects are her Dotted Rays by Stephen West and Hipster (In the ‘Wednesday’ colorway!) by Joji Locatelli, two of her “most favorite designers.” Now, when I am getting ready to start a project, I typically choose the pattern first, then find the yarns. I like that because then I can secure the right yardage. Perhaps it’s a perk of being a dyer and not having to worry about having enough yarn, but Carolyn works the other way: “I usually have a slew of patterns printed as well as swirling in my head and I need to be inspired by the yarns to knit a particular pattern. Just yesterday I was unpacking my yarns from a show and saw the perfect combo for a Comfort Fade Cardi by Andrea Mowry. I usually let the yarns determine what to make. Which is why I don’t typically make the latest popular pattern.”
If the yarns don’t speak to it, it won’t get made.
—Carolyn of Swift Yarns
This time, I decided on my project Carolyn-style, as I had a pattern waiting for the perfect yarn, and ‘Wednesday’ on Swift Bliss was it. A few months ago, Joey of Winter’s Weather Knits published a beautiful sock pattern I had to snag, the Celebration Socks. I loved the refined style and the story behind the pattern…and I had no idea that the pattern included bobbles!
Now, I’ve avoided bobbles. Bobbles just do not befit the serious badass I am. Absolutely not.
Ha, oops. Even the mighty fall.
Joey’s bobbles are subtle; she makes them smaller for both aesthetic and practical reasons (which I appreciate, because big bobbles on socks sounds uncomfortable, yeah.) They don’t really look like bobbles until you get really close, and the overall effect is actually…elegant. Elegant bobbles, who knew?!
Turns out that I had to adapt the bobble technique to work for me. I knit loosely, which can be easier on the hands, but makes a situation in which small bobbles can “fall” through the stitches and be rather pathetic. Fortunately, the Knitters of Instagram rushed to my rescue, and I soon had a two-step tactic to make my bobbles more properly bobbly. Carolyn herself suggested the first half of the trick: wrapping the yarn around the bobble like a short-row wrap-and-turn. It took a lot of extra time to do this, mind you, but helped so much. Secondly, on the row following the bobbles, I would twist the stitch just above it, making it tighter and giving the bobble less extra space to sink into. And now I have properly perky bobbles.
(I bet you didn’t expect anyone to tell you about their perky bobbles today, now did you?)
I made socks with bobbles!
Well, the bobbles are lovely, and the Fleegle heel, as always, is a winner. The fit on these socks is perfect. (For the record, I made a few small adjustments on stitch count, which was super easy to do since the back side of the sock is just stockinette, and there’s no stitch pattern to fudge.)
Joey’s pattern is designed to mimic the surgical scars that mark her ankle after a broken bone. It was a hard time for her, accepting help from others, she says, but she is grateful for the unexpected opportunities that slowing down brought her. And thus, the name of the sock pattern, Celebration.
“These socks, inspired by my surgical scars, mark the undertaking of a whole new journey, and the celebration of getting up when life knocks you down.”
Aesthetically, the ‘Wednesday’ colorway is a beautiful match for the pattern. But even more beautiful is what the dyeing process means to Carolyn. She says that she started dyeing at a personally difficult time in her life, and this was one of those first colorways. Like so many dyers, Carolyn feels indebted to the fiber community that has had such a positive impact on her life, “inspiring, encouraging, and helping her personally.” I love that both yarn and pattern together speak to the bittersweet beauty of human struggle.
“I believe that if I keep my hands on yarn, it will guide me through the next series of sharp turns, too.”
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If you’ve read this far, you’re in luck! Carolyn is offering free shipping to readers of The Yarnscaping Blog. Enter the code freeship4yarnscaping now through November 1st!
You can find Carolyn and Swift Yarns at their
Website: Swift Yarns
Instagram: @swift_yarns
Ravelry: Swift Yarns and her group, Swift Yarns
You can find the Celebration Socks on Ravelry: Celebration Socks
and Joey of Winter’s Weather Knits on
Instagram: wintersweatherknits
Ravelry: Winter’s Weather Knits