101 Uses For Ladder Lace

But First!

Congratulations to Karen J./Lunadog!

Karen is "Q", the winner of the shop contest announced yesterday. Karen lives quite close to me, as it turns out, and she came by this morning to pick up her yarn order and to choose her yarn prize. She picked the blueberry coloured Ultra Alpaca/Recycled silk and wool combo.

Karen bought the yarn from me in order to knit a shawl for a fundraising auction for: Big Heart Rescue. Karen volunteers, drives and fosters dogs for this organization that finds new homes for abused dogs and cats in BC. You can read more about Big Heart Rescue HERE. Karen says they are always in need of new foster parents.

What was I talking about before? Oh yes, Ladder Lace. I had no intention of buying, dyeing and adding Ladder Lace to my shop, but I have done all three of those things. I don't think I will regret it, even if I turn out to be the only person who ends up knitting this stuff.

I had serious reservations about buying it in the first place since I am not much for novelty yarns. And when it arrived, it was, eh. White. So what.

But then I started dyeing it. Oh my. Even if I never knit it, I want to own it just to look at it. Pretty. Pretty. Pretty. It is so much fun to dye. The fun pretty much pays for the yarn in entertainment value for me.

I've dyed up five different colorways of LL so far, and all are photographed and available in my shop. The pictures don't really do justice to the rich colours and just sheer fun of the stuff. When Karen and her friend J came by today, we all oogled and gushed over the stuff.

But what do you make with Ladder Lace? I plan to focus some attention on this issue over this next month, and to make it more fun, I have offered a new CUSTOMER APPRECIATION EVENT in my shop. Go have a look at how you can enter to win four skeins of Ladder Lace in the colour of your choice. By the time the contest closes, we should have come up with all kinds of possibilities for it.



Here are some things I plan to try:

Above, I have cast on thirty stitches on 6mm needles and plan to knit a basic garter stitch scarf. I have certain people on my Christmas list who love a bit of bling in their lives, so this will likely go to one of them. I plan to put fringe on the ends. This colour is Black Light. I first swatched it with black shiny cotton DK. It looked very dramatic and quite different from above. In the end, I decided to do the scarf delicate and lacy in just plain Ladder Lace.

Below, plans to knit up a simple garter triangle shawl with one strand of Nasturtium Ladder Lace and one strand of a nice merino sock yarn I've had hanging around.



Other ideas I've thought of: Fly fishing lures. Gift wrapping ribbon. Craft ribbon for any number of projects. I can picture really cute hair doomies for girls who like it fancy. If Hayley was younger, I would cut a bunch of it up into streamers for decorating the ends of magic fairy wands (we used to make these at her birthday parties). I also want to hang skeins of it from my ceiling in front of a slightly open window, but that's just me.

I'd love to hear your ideas for Ladder Lace.

A quick Wren update:

I've knit a sleeve. I decided to go with a four inch stretch of the 1x1 ribbing. I really like the way the sleeves look on the Blue Sky Alpaca Cropped Cardi, and I thought I could do something similar with Wren.



I think this will look really good.



So far, I've done the back, a sleeve, and most of the second sleeve.



Moonlight Sonata is still waiting for the rest of the repeat I'm working on. I'll post when the moons are full. :)