Malabrigo + Woolgirl

Woolgirl, a yarn store that specializes in hand-dyed yarns, has recently invited Malabrigo's Head Dyer, Antonio, to be a part of a very exciting project! Antonio will be designing a colorway exclusively for the August 2011 edition of Woolgirl's new 'Victorian Writers' themed Knitting Club.



Antonio is going to be dyeing to a garden theme, inspired by Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," a short story that is full of delightfully colorful visual imagery. Who knows what part of the story Antonio will draw his colorway from? I pulled out a few samples from an online, public-domain edition that I felt would be especially inspirational:

"... wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run... and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans ...and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion..."

"There were flowers: delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations, masses of carnations. There were roses; there were irises... And then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale — as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer’s day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower — roses, carnations, irises, lilac — glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!"

Antonio's month, August 2011, can be purchased for $70 on the Woolgirl website. This includes not only the yarn and pattern to make a very lovely pair of themed socks, but each month also comes with several other goodies -- a themed stitch marker and an assortment of knitting notions, from project bags to vintage and boutique items. Each kit will also come with a little information on how Antonio chose the colorway, and you can participate in an official Woolgirl Club KAL, too!

This is such a fun way to get an inside look at a great writer -- and a great dyer's interpretation of her work!

Chau, Hannah