Secret Stash Club Reveal: Winter’s End

For the second colourway release part of our Secret Stash colour club, we’re excited to finally share with you “Winter’s End”. This month was especially delightful as we were able to create and dye our colour story on both yarn and fibre, as March brought releases to both our monthly yarn and quarterly fibre club subscribers. We spent several weeks working on this colourway and it’s been an excellent experience in learning how we communicate to each other about colour here in the studio. We discovered that the backstory about the colourway is essential to how we envision the colour as we create it.

THE STORY BEHIND WINTER’S END

As Felicia shared with this month’s Club parcels:
Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’ve had a really unusual, but not unprecedented, warm winter. The Farmer’s Almanac says it’s an “El Nino” year which means warmer temperatures and less snow overall. That typically wouldn’t be a big deal except if your kids’ main winter activity is attempting to learn alpine ski racing. Desperately in search of snow and higher elevations, our kids’ ski coaches were compelled to relocate all the weekend training sessions from our local mountain (about 30 minutes away) to Whistler Blackcomb (about 2 hours and 30 minutes away).

In the middle of winter, the 5 am drive to Whistler up the Sea-to-Sky highway is pitch black. There are very few lights along the way, so much of the drive is lit by your own headlights. At any time,  you can only see about 20 feet in front of you. If you’re lucky, the weather is clear. Otherwise, the drive might be snowy or rainy. I find the drive really trippy — driving a long and winding road in the dark, it feels like sometimes you don’t know if you are driving up or down, left or right. Sometimes, I even have to look to the side of the road to get proof that my car is still moving. I’m driving 100 km an hour and sometimes it feels like I’m going nowhere. I’m just in darkness, not knowing what turn is coming next. 

But that’s life isn’t it? Fumbling full speed through darkness, not sure what is up ahead. 

Despite it being a bit gruelling to do these early mornings and long drives, I am already grieving it a bit. When will be the last time we do these long drives together? When will these winters come to an end?

PROJECT IDEAS

For this month’s Club yarn, Charlotte was inspired to pair the Winter’s End colourway with something that would highlight the subtle nuances in the skein. A fun and easy knit accessory, she chose Tabetha Hedrick’s Kiowa shawl design. With hints of lace against a background of garter stitch, it’s a fun project that suits every level of knitter. Read more about the Winter’s End Kiowa project here »

For the spinning fibre, Winter’s End was dyed on our Polwarth+Silk base. This fibre is a beautiful combination which is easy to draft, super soft, with a decadent shimmer from the silk. It could create a delicate mixing and blending of colours through fractal spinning, creating a 2-ply yarn that will bloom and puff with wet-finishing.

JOIN THE CLUB CONVO

We would love to hear your thoughts on this colourway, and to see what you make with it. Whether you knit, crochet, weave, or something else, join us at our crafty community at the SweetGeorgia Discord server. We’ve created a special section for Secret Stash and we’ll create a new thread for each month’s release.

You can find all future samples of our Club colourway projects at our Project Index page  »

You can also see a closer look of this colourway reveal at our March SweetGeorgia livestream »