Movers & Makers Wicker Park Worsted
One of the biggest challenges for me as a new-ish knitter is yarn. I just don’t know enough about it and how it behaves to feel comfortable picking out a new yarn or substituting in a project. It’s not a big deal when I’m making a pair of socks with a single skein, but when it’s a sweater with two yarns held double it’s riskier. Who wants to spend two months knitting only to discover that alpaca stretches waaaay more than the suggested yarn, and now your t-shirt is a t-shirt dress?
I’ve started yarn talk to encourage me to branch out and try new yarns. I’ll try to pick local or small batch dyers when I can so that I’ll be able to see what they’re like without the benefit of pages and pages of project pages on Ravelry.
This week I tried knitting with Movers & Makers Wicker Park Worsted. It’s available exclusively at my local yarn store, Nina Chicago. I’d seen it before but never tried it. This yarn is 100% superwash merino. It’s hand dyed by Kristin Oldach in small batches and has cool local names for its colorways like reckless red (for reckless records, a vinyl record store), violet hour (an artisanal cocktail bar in wicker park), and smoke daddy (a BBQ place). I used winter on hoyne and gold star blackout to knit up two June hats by Meghan Kelly from Kelbourne Woolens year of hats.
There are 218 yards in each hank, so there was more than enough to knit two hats out of the two colors.
I have to say, the yarn was lovely. It was soft and springy and not at all splitty, even using the sharp metal needles that I like. The black is pretty tonal, with parts of it reading more gray than true black, but I like the way it knit up. I would definitely use this yarn again, and I’m really excited that it’s local. Do you have a go-to yarn? I would love to hear about it.
A Yarn Tail 