Just after I got home from my summer on the mainland, my husband (who is still in Michigan) announced that he had a new mohair shawl commission for me, and the person wanted it in lime green. Lime green! That is not a color I gravitate to naturally when I am in a yarn store, and it certainly wasn’t a color that I had a lot of in my stash. I found two possibles, some plied handspun I bought at the Ann Arbor Art Fair from the Ann Arbor Fiber Arts Guild’s booth, and some lovely handpainted mohair that I bought from Elizabeth Boekken of Elizabeth Designs. In both cases there was just a bit of lime green in a mixed yarn, and I had almost rejected both yarns because of the green! It isn’t that I hate the color, just that it isn’t part of my usual palette and I thought the green might interfere with whatever I mixed the yarn with.
I remembered Daryl Lancaster saying that her recipe for livening up any color combination is “a shot of lime green.” But this person didn’t want just a shot, she wanted the whole shawl to be lime green. If I had still been on the mainland, I could have incorporated the hunt for lime green into my yarn shopping, which would have been fun. But I was already home in Honolulu. There wasn’t any immediate deadline on the project, but it began to haunt me. I thought I might be able to use Elizabeth’s variegated gray and green mohair for the weft, although is is only a little bit green, so I was initially looking for warp yarns. I found three possibilities at Woodland Woolworks in Carleton, Oregon, which I had been to just a few weeks before. In fact I started there because I had a discount coupon from my recent purchases. I bought three skeins of Brown Sheep worsted in Limeade, some Jo Sharp Silk Road tweed in asparagus, and two skeins of Wildberry in lemon lime. Everything was on sale except the Brown Sheep, which is reasonably priced to begin with.
The package came a couple of days ago. The Brown Sheep is a very bright lime green, the Wildberry is considerably lighter and yellower, and the Jo Sharp Silk Road is darker, but they should work together in a mixed warp. I set them all out in a pile and began combing through my stash again. This time I found a cone of Harrisville Highland in a light green-aqua that blended nicely with the other greens, a couple of small skeins of a light green wool, a very nubby novelty in shades of light and dark green with a little turquoise, and some wound-off balls of a textured novelty rayon in a light green. I added the handspun from Ann Arbor to the mix, but Elizabeth’s mohair just did not go with the rest, even when I tried twisting it with the limeade wool as a thicker weft. I would have to find some lime green mohair.
My initial selection of lime green yarn
I had my husband check to see if C.J. Botero at Forma had any lime green mohair. The answer came back that he only had some rayon, and didn’t think much of lime green as a color. So tonight I found myself searching the Internet again and this time I found just what I needed: Gelato handpainted mohair in a soft lime green streaked with white. It was on a closeout sale at Paradise Fiber. The website only gave the weight, so I had to locate the same yarn at another site, Fiber Trends, in order to find out what the yardage was. When I tried to put it into my shopping cart back at Paradise Fiber it turned out that color was not available. So I went back to Fiber Trends, where I bought two skeins for a couple of dollars more, but still a good sale price.
Happy with my purchase, I went to my loom to do a little weaving on the twill scarf that I am weaving on a black wool warp with left over bobbins of Noro Silk Garden sock yarn. What color should come up next but lime green–not once, but twice! I think I may have gotten my bobbins out of sequence, because I ended up with three sections of lime green with two stretches of purple in between them. Sounds awful, but it looks fine, because of the way the Noro yarns gently change color. Of course the other end of the scarf is a completely different set of colors with no repeats at all, so it will be a big surprise to see what the whole thing looks like when I take it off the loom.
I still have a bobbin and a half of my leftovers, but now that I have freed up some bobbins I am going to wind off all of my last full ball of the Noro sock yarn, which is a beautiful colorway of gray, black, fuschia, and some light brown. I will do the second scarf on the black warp with the Noro yarn in the proper color sequence, and worry about what to do with all the leftovers after I’ve finished it.
I am off to Singapore for a conference next week, so I do not know if I will get the second scarf finished before I leave. I have already printed out a nice list of the yarn stores in Singapore. It all seems to be imported, but since much of it is from Australia and New Zealand, there may be some interesting finds. The Fiber Trends website says the lime green Gelato mohair I just ordered comes originally from New Zealand, but I do not know where it is handpainted. I hope I don’t find it on sale for even less in Singapore!
[...] My lime green saga began two years ago when my husband had a commission for me to weave a lime green shawl as a wedding present. Yes, I know, it is a rather odd wedding present, but he had already asked the bride what her favorite color was, and the answer was “lime green.” I blogged then about my initial efforts to find some lime green yarn, and left the story at that point. I was not satisfied with what I had collected long distance, so the following June when I was packing to go to the lake for the summer, I included my small stash of lime green yarn. [...]