Tag Archives: brooklyn tweed

Capsule, by Michele Wang for Brooklyn Tweed.

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The latest book from Brooklyn Tweed has landed here at the Hillsborough Yarn Shop! Take a peek inside Capsule, by Michele Wang.

Michele Wang designed this collection of garments and accessories with loungewear in mind, the kind of cozy, wearable knits one might fantasize about curling up in all winter. Like so many of Wang’s patterns for Brooklyn Tweed yarns, these are intricate and deeply-textured, designed with great attention to detail.

Now that we carry Brooklyn Tweed yarns, I’m happy to report that you can find most of the yarns featured in these patterns here at the shop. Four of these designs call for Shelter, Brooklyn Tweed’s worsted weight, woolen-spun Targhee-Columbia wool, which we currently have in every available color.

The same can be said of Loft, Shelter’s fingering weight counterpart, used in two of these patterns. The remainder are knit in Quarry, a bulky weight that we don’t currently stock; we’re happy to help you find a proper substitute if you fall for one of the Quarry designs.

Look for Michele Wang’s Capsule on the teacart here at the shop, surrounded by other Brooklyn Tweed books and the latest publications. We’re also expecting a Capsule trunk show later in the year, something to look forward to! In the meantime, see you at the shop.

Hello, Brooklyn Tweed Arbor.

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Brooklyn Tweed yarns are now available at the Hillsborough Yarn Shop! We’re starting with Shelter, Loft, and Arbor, and introducing each one on the blog this week. Today, meet Arbor.

Brooklyn Tweed Arbor is a 3-ply DK weight yarn composed of 100% Targhee wool. It’s Brooklyn Tweed’s newest yarn, and their biggest departure from what has so far been a line of woolen-spun heathers – Arbor is worsted-spun, and skein-dyed in solid colors at the organically-certified Saco River Dyehouse in Maine.

All 30 of these subtle, intriguingly-named colors are now on our shelves.

Worsted-spun yarns are more durable and dense than their woolen-spun counterparts, and have sharper stitch definition for crisp cables, lace, and texture patterns.

Targhee wool spun in this manner has an abundance of one of my favorite yarn characteristics: elasticity. Garments knit with Arbor should wear well and look sharp for years to come.

Brooklyn Tweed’s first round of patterns for Arbor are perfect examples of how well this yarn behaves in cables and texture patterns. Here are a few that caught my eye:

All of these Brooklyn Tweed patterns (and so many more!) are available as Ravelry In-Store Pattern Sales, where you purchase the pattern here at the shop and a digital copy is saved in your email and/or Ravelry pattern library. We’ll print a copy for you, too, so you can head right home and cast on.

Look for more ideas on our DK weight Pinterest board, and look for Brooklyn Tweed Arbor in the DK weight section here at the shop. See you there!

Hello, Brooklyn Tweed Loft.

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Brooklyn Tweed yarns are now available at the Hillsborough Yarn Shop! We’re starting with Shelter, Loft, and Arbor, and introducing each one on the blog this week. Today, meet Loft.

Brooklyn Tweed Loft is a fingering weight, woolen-spun Targhee-Columbia wool. Loft is named for one of its best qualities, and like Shelter, it’s somewhat delicate, but especially warm for its weight.

We have all 37 colors of Loft in stock, a playground for the eyes. Like Shelter, these shades are created by dyeing the fiber in 16 vibrant solids, then blending them, two or three at a time, into intricate heathers.

Ever since Clara Parkes reviewed Loft back in 2011 and described it as “pretty much perfect,” I’ve been anxious to get my hands on it. Now that it’s here at the shop, I’ve been combing through years of my favorites on Ravelry, considering which Loft pattern I’d most like to start with. Here are some of the many:

You can tell from this selection that I have a special fondness for stranded colorwork, and while Loft is especially well-suited to that technique, it’s just as happy to render lace or texture patterns, along with simple stockinette. Case in point: Anne has her eye on “Hellebore,” by Michele Wang, a pullover with stockinette body and cabled sleeves. In fact, she has already eagerly knit a swatch, and all that’s left is to choose a color – a fun, hard decision with so many beautiful shades at our fingertips.

All of these Brooklyn Tweed patterns (and so many more!) are available as Ravelry In-Store Pattern Sales, where you purchase the pattern here at the shop and a digital copy is saved in your email and/or Ravelry pattern library. We’ll print a copy for you, too, so you can head right home and cast on. Look for more Loft pattern inspiration on our Fingering weight Pinterest board!

Look for Brooklyn Tweed Loft in the fingering weight section here at the shop. See you there!

Hello, Brooklyn Tweed Shelter.

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Brooklyn Tweed yarns are now available at the Hillsborough Yarn Shop! We’re starting with Shelter, Loft, and Arbor, and introducing each one on the blog this week. Today, meet Shelter.

Brooklyn Tweed Shelter is a worsted weight, woolen-spun Targhee-Columbia wool, sourced, dyed, and spun entirely in the USA. Woolen-spun yarns are lofty and somewhat delicate, and because of the air trapped between their jumbled fibers, they are also especially warm for their weight. Clara Parkes has written at length about this, in her Knitter’s Book of Wool as well as in her glowing review of Shelter.

We have all 40 colors of Shelter in stock, an outstanding palette of 37 heathers and 3 marls. These shades are created by dyeing the fiber in 16 vibrant solids, then blending them, two or three at a time, into intricate heathers.

In the marled colorways, each ply is a different shade.

Shelter is amenable to a range of gauges, in part because it’s woolen-spun, and is happy to expand or contract based on the needle size used. Give your finished piece a soapy bath, and you’ll find that the yarn blooms into a cohesive, somewhat fuzzy fabric.

The Brooklyn Tweed archives are bursting with tempting patterns for Shelter, the first yarn they developed, and a browse through those patterns show that the yarn is well suited to all manner of techniques, from cables and texture to lace and colorwork. Here are some of the Shelter patterns I’ve admired over the years, that I can’t wait to take another look at now that this exciting yarn is easily within reach:

All of these Brooklyn Tweed patterns (and so many more!) are available as Ravelry In-Store Pattern Sales, where you purchase the pattern here at the shop and a digital copy is saved in your email and/or Ravelry pattern library. We’ll print a copy for you, too, so you can head right home and cast on. Check out our Worsted weight Pinterest board for a few more pattern ideas!

Look for Brooklyn Tweed Shelter in the worsted weight section here at the shop. See you there!

Hello, Brooklyn Tweed.

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If you’ve read our newsletter and blog carefully over the past couple of weeks, you know we’ve had something big in the works. Our excitement and anticipation are so great that it’s been near impossible to keep the surprise under our hats, but the surprise has now arrived, in eight huge boxes.

I’m delighted to announce that we now carry Brooklyn Tweed yarns here at the Hillsborough Yarn Shop!

Founded by designer and photographer Jared Flood in 2010, Brooklyn Tweed is a yarn company devoted to supporting the domestic textile industry, and one known as much for their exquisite knitting patterns as for their thoughtfully-produced yarns. We’ve followed them all these years, often admiring and occasionally knitting their patterns, hoping to become a stockist when the time was right. I’m so happy the time has come!

We’re starting with Brooklyn Tweed’s first two yarns, Shelter and Loft, along with their very latest, Arbor.

Brooklyn Tweed’s dedication to producing wool conscientiously here in the US is a major part of their appeal. One of the other things we love about Brooklyn Tweed yarns is that they are breed-specific, so you can get to know and appreciate the subtle differences in wool, as they do vary from sheep breed to sheep breed. Their colors are special, too – intricate heathers made by dyeing, then blending, then spinning the wool, in the case of Shelter and Loft, or by skein-dyeing at the organically-certified Saco River Dyehouse in Maine, in the case of Arbor.

Each of these three Brooklyn Tweed yarns will get a proper introduction here on the blog, but in the meantime, they’ve found a happy home on our shelves, so come by the shop to see them in person!

New books from Brooklyn Tweed.

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We are so excited to announce that we now carry books from Brooklyn Tweed! We have their first two books in stock: Capsule, by Olga Buraya-Kefelian, and Woolens, by Jared Flood.

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I’ve been following Brooklyn Tweed since it was but a blog, admiring many of the patterns Jared Flood and his design team have put out over the years, and knitting as many as my overflowing to-knit list allows.

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Brooklyn Tweed designs have always been something I found online, and thus I’ve experienced them primarily as digital photos and pdfs. It is quite different to see these patterns nicely printed and bound, and as a lover of paper and books as well as yarn and knitwear, I am smitten with these, and particularly with Woolens.

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Woolens is a collection of accessories designed and photographed by Jared Flood, covering a range of techniques including brioche, colorwork, cables, and other texture patterns.

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Most designs are unisex, and many are shown in alternate colorways or sizes to give a sense of the options for different looks. Though those options and modifications are always present and possible when we make things ourselves, it really helps to see a few of them before we embark on our own version of a pattern – think of how much time we spend on Ravelry, scrolling through projects.

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byway

Our friend and teacher Marsha fell in love with Woolens, too, and is teaching the “Byway” scarf/wrap here at the shop, beginning in January. Look for it on our “Classes” page, where you can read a full description and sign up to attend, if you like.

Though we don’t carry Brooklyn Tweed yarns, we have lots of great substitutes in a range of gauges to suit these designs. As ever, clever yarn substitution depends on considerations of gauge and beyond; fiber content and characteristics along with personal preferences and expectations all color the decision of what yarn goes with which project. We are always happy to talk these choices through with you when you’re shopping for yarn here, so don’t hesitate to ask!

Look for Brooklyn Tweed books on our teacart by the ball-winder, among the latest knitting publications. See you there!

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