NEW YARN: Backyard Chickens Sets 2020 from Hue Loco
We are super excited to be able to launch the new 2020 breeds of Hue Loco’s Backyard Chickens yarn as soon as they have hatched! If you are not yet familiar with these amazing yarn combination sets, dyer Nicole of Hue Loco has pinpointed nuances of the gorgeous natural colours of various backyard chicken breeds and for three years now has offered sets of 100g mail colours with two complimentary contrast 20g mini skeins to knit the most beautiful unusually coloured socks or shawls!
We are lucky enough to be one of the only shops in Canada to carry Hue Loco’s amazing yarn, and I believe we are the ONLY place in the world currently that has stock of every breed of her 2018, 2019 and 2020 sets! How do these translate from chickens to yarn to knitware you might ask? This gorgeous Black Wheaten Ameraucana rooster inspired the colourway for the shawl above and you can see how it represents the gorgeous blue-brown speckles and pops of bright orange and translucent lavendar in this bird’s glistening feathers!
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 have 24 different sets to choose from! Here’s a sneak peek at some of this year’s colourways that launch today…
These amazing yarn sets that are inspired by the colours found in chicken breeds of today’s modern urban farmers…
Photo credit: Hue Loco via IG
To highlight the amazing colour combinations in a handknit, I used Stephen West’s free Boneyard Shawl pattern as a base for my newest shawl, and alternated colours and a simple lace pattern for every second rib, until my yarn ran out! I used one of the contrasting minis for ribs in the long an short ends of the shawl as well as the cast-off, and the other contrasting mini near the middle to use up as much of the yarn as possible. It was a bit of an experiment, but amusing enough to make it one of my quickest knits to date!
Nicole has stopped dyeing the 2018 sets for the time being, so these are very limited edition at the moment, and include some of our previous favorites including the New Hampshire Red rooster that we used for our Downhome Shawl sample:
… as well as my favorite the Welsummer rooster, used here to knit a pair of socks in the free Harris Tweed pattern (with enough yarn left to knit a second pair!):
These sets present many colour combinations not often seen in knitting yarn but as they are inspired by nature, they work perfectly together. And Hue Loco has a magical talent at drawing so many nuances of colours into a single string that it is a pleasure to watch it slip through your hands when working up.
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 good amount of yardage allows for a lot of fun working up a simple shawl with an allowance for a few good colour pops! And as noted above, Alicia Plummer specifically designed her Downhome Shawl to work specifically with Hue Loco’s Backyard Chicken sets, and was our Project of the Month earlier this year!
We also carry a good selection of Hue Loco’s regular colourways in her special 50g half-skeins that allow you to play with multiple colours in a single project. Check these out here.