As the crocuses valiantly start to poke through the hard winter soil you know that spring is around the corner, and the backyard chickens will again start to appear. Nicole Clark, a self professed art lover, knitter and host of the Hue Loco podcast from Boulder, Colorado has been making waves in the yarny circles with her ability to match unique colour combinations in nature onto her yarn base canvas. One of our favs of her many yarn offerings are sock sets (one full skein with a coordinating mini skein) based on the colours found in various species of common backyard chickens.

Each set comes with a 100g skein in a main colour as well as two coordinating 20g skeinettes for all your colourwork pleasure! Socks are the most obvious way to use these sets but a simple shawl with an allowance for a few good colour pops would work as well and Alicia Plummer specifically designed her Downhome Shawl to work specifically with Hue Loco’s Backyard Chicken sets!

This shawl came with its own special game of yarn chicken and I lost! We now sell the pattern with the recommendation to stop one round early, but otherwise you use up almost every inch of this 140g set! We have a few stray chickens still at our shop, but a full set of Hue Loco’s eight 2018 sets, eight 2019 sets and even a pre-launch of her brand new eight 2020 colourway sets will be available at our booth at Fibres West launching on Friday the 13th of March!

With four species of roosters (dyed on her Merino Sock base of a bouncy twist 80% SW Merino 20% Nylon) and four species of hens (dyed on her Phyllis Sock base of a relaxed twist 75% SW Merino 25% Nylon) for each year, we will have 24 different sets to choose from!

BUY rooster OR hen SETS HERE!