New from Schoppel-Wolle.

Last week, we unpacked a very large box of yarn from Schoppel-Wolle, a German company perhaps best known for their self-striping sock yarn, Zauberball.

Zauberball is a fingering weight yarn that slowly changes from one color to the next several yards at a time, so that whatever you’re knitting or crocheting with it comes out striped.

It’s sturdy for a single-ply yarn, thanks to its fiber content: a blend of superwash wool and nylon that is perfect for making socks. A quick Ravelry search for Zauberball reveals that it’s good for more than socks, though–so many Zauberballs have grown up into shawls and scarves like “Wingspan,” “Citron,” “Spectra,” and “Elise.”

Crazy Zauberball is a 2-ply version of the same thing, giving the finished fabric a marled look.

Zauberball Starke 6 is a thicker version of Crazy Zauberball–same superwash fiber content, same stripes, but in sport weight. You may have seen our “Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf” made up in Zauberball Starke 6, and that short-row shaped scarf is a great way to show off the yarn’s stripes; also consider Elizabeth Zimmermann’s “Baby Surprise Jacket,” or “Wurm,” a cute (and free) hat pattern.

We also got a brand new yarn from Schoppel-Wolle, another patterning sock yarn called Das Paar. Das Paar solves one of the problems of self-patterning or self-striping yarn, which is that it has kind of a mind of its own. One can’t easily have perfectly matched stripes on a pair of socks, fingerless mitts, or sleeves, without winding and rewinding the yarn to get to just the right point in the color sequence. Many knitters don’t find this problematic at all, and make peace with fraternal twin socks. For those who want a perfectly matched pair, Das Paar is wound into two 50 g skeins that start at the same point in the color sequence. Come by the shop to check it out, along with all the other Zauberball yarns!