Yarns to Love
Rifton Is Back!
If you’ve been following the evolution of our lush and lovely little online shop, then you know that one of our first products was a custom colorway of Jill Draper’s virtuosic multi-color yarn, Rifton. Our one-and-only stunner of a colorway was called Appalachian Trail, in honor of this blog’s long, rambling correspondence, which, like the trail, crosses the Modern Daily Line.
Rules Are Rules
When we ordered the yarn, Jill explained the Rules of Rifton. It boiled down to that favorite saying of preschool teachers: you get what you get, and you don’t get upset.
Rifton combines hand-dyed colored yarns (which start out as white fleece) with natural, undyed dark shades of wool from brown, black, gray and salt-and-pepper sheep. There are only so many dark-colored fleeces produced, and only so much time available at the Green Mountain Spinnery to fiddle with a yarn with such unusual construction.
You can’t just put Rifton on the mill’s carders and fluffers (apologies for the technical lingo), and then spin white yarn afterwards. Rifton has to bide its time and await its turn. All these factors (and others, probably) mean that Jill can only make so much Rifton, and then we have to wait for the dark-colored sheep to grow another crop of fleeces, and start the process all over again next year.
Appalachian Trail was beautiful and we loved it and we sold out quickly. I got one precious skein of it for myself, which I made into a beautiful cowl. I may have shed a self-pitying tear or two when that cowl was done. No more Rifton. Our cupboard was bare. A whole year stretched in front of us. Â We had to be patient. So so so patient. Patient as saints.
It was going pretty well, the patience thing. A minimum of whining, really. And then, in early 2017, two of our favorite designers published two fantastic patterns, JUST FOR RIFTON.
Fissure, by Elizabeth Elliott:
(Photos by Gale Zucker.)
And Fallowed, by Bristol Ivy:
The Rifton just sings in these patterns; there is a true marriage of yarn and pattern. Â These designers have put their foot on the gas and taken Rifton out for a heckuva spin.
To H*ck With Patience
You can guess what happened to our patience when we laid eyes on these patterns.
Yeah. We went running back to Jill, begging for more Rifton.
Jill came through. Perhaps that is a measure of our whining and pleading ability, or Jill’s graciousness. I prefer to think it’s the latter.
So, starting today, we have Rifton back in stock, in Jill’s original four colorways:
Clockwise from upper left: Winter. Spring. Summer. Autumn.
And in case you need a solid to go with them, three lovely solid shades of Rifton Mono: Bering (pale blue), Amaranth (plummy) and Central Park Bench (park bench green).
Fissure or Fallowed
I went through a fair amount of soul-searching to decide which pattern to make: Fissure or Fallowed. In truth, I want them both. Also in truth, I need neither one. These are must-knits for me, but they are purely “process” knits: I just want to make them, and then look at them forever, and maybe swan around in them once in a while when it’s chilly.
I decided to start with Fissure for one reason: it uses two colorways of Rifton and one shade of Rifton Mono, so I get MOAR COLORZZ.
(See at the top, where the gray is starting to dawn? That’s the thing that really gets me about Rifton.)
Knitting on my Fissure wrap is pure zen. I save it for a treat, and it is delicious.
Fissure has so many things I love: knitting on the bias, asymmetry, garter stitch, and also asymmetrical garter stitch. And then those contrasting zig-zags (which are short rows) to ease the transition from the Spring colorway to the Winter colorway. I haven’t yet decided which color my zig-zags will be.
What color is your Rifton?
NOOOOOO……stop it! Ok, my retirement check arrives on the 1st and I see a Fissure in my future!
Great, just great. Just when I was going to take a break from buying yarn…
Oh Rifton…le sigh.
Would Rifton be a good sock yarn if you don’t care whether they match exactly?
Rifton! Yahooooooooooooooo 🙂
I can never come here, because I always want to knit whatever it is whichever of you is knitting at that moment (um, there was a sentence in there at one point). And I already have an untenable number of wips, dammit. (I swear there was a compliment in there too.) Gorgeous project.
Well isn’t this all just lovely! I think that the Autumn colorway is my favorite. Also, as I was scrolling down, and you mentioned your desire to knit both Fissure and Fallowed, I went back up to the shawls, and thought, “But Fissure is such a Kay Gardiner pattern, in Kay Gardiner colors.” Then I scrolled down a little more, and saw that you had started with Fissure! Too bad you didn’t have some kind of contest for guessing that!
Do you think there’s a way to make the Fissure shawl into a blanket? Could you double the pattern somehow?
I don’t see why not; it would require a bit of tweaking and some math. Multiplying the number of stitches in each section by the same number would keep the proportions the same, and while you’d be making a much wider Fissure, you’d also probably be making a shorter piece, so you might (*might*) be okay on yarn, or to be safe you could use a third colourway for the middle bit (thus having an excuse for a third Rifton colourway, which is no bad thing). The solid contrasting stripes are worked as short rows, which gives the shawl a bit of a curve; for a blanket I’d do them as intarsia and work the same shaping as you do in regular rows. You’d need to either multiply the difference in length between each solid stripe by the same number you used to increase the sections or work more stripes, depending on your preference. I think it would make a striking blanket; I might have to try that myself!
We are three knitters from Italy and would like to have 3 Fissure kits, could we know the price please and the fee for shipping? Waiting for a kind answer from you Giulia.