minikin mania

"A lot to love in a little package"

The beauty of having a yarn company is if I want a specific thing, I make it. I know I'm spoiled. This also means that I can play with yarns and, ultimately, share my fun ideas with you. I figure, if I needed it, other people would find they did too. It was time to re-knit  a favorite design as the original yarn suggested had been discontinued, but it would need a shorter gradient than currently available, I didn't want to ask that customers buy a full ball of yarn only to have to break it into segments and discard 1/2 of it. Enter the Minikin. 

We took our best-selling yarn - the mulesing-free US merino Shawl Ball - and make it small. Our minikins are 107 yards/.9 oz balls that perfectly match our Shawl Balls and Yarn Bombs, but in a miniature version. It's 1/4 size of a Shawl Ball, or 1/8 of a Yarn Bomb, but the base is identical. While dyeing these guys up new design ideas kept popping in my head. I'll share a few ways to play with minikins below. 

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• Use a minikin for a contrast color on a yoke of a sweater, or for a larger yoke, use a Shawl Ball and then match the design on the cuffs with the Minikin. For the Gardengate sweater by Jenn Steingass at left I used a Yarn Bomb for the body, one Shawl Ball for each sleeve and 3 minikins (2 dark and 1 light) for the patternwork. So easy!
• Match a patterned sleeve to a body knit with a Shawl Ball as shown below right in Veera Välimäki's Breathing Space as knit by Jen Aviles. Jen used a Vertigo Shawl Ball for the body and a same-colored Minikin for the sleeves - Perfection!

• Minikins are right-sized to use for a cool beanie, we're loving two of them together for Brioche Knots by Katrin Schubert - below is one knit by Jen in Dirty Hippie and Metropolis.

Another favorite is the Alaska hat.The first one is done in Espresso (2 balls) and Coho for the lovely sunrise and the second in Vertigo (2 balls) and Dahlia for the sky. I'm itching to make another, I think the next will be in Aurora for the sky with Canyon for the trees.. 

Mismitts in Hard Candy and Aloha Minikins

​The Minikins have only been available a short time but I've been designing some fun Minikin-specific projects like these Mismitts fingerless gloves, using two balls with a slip-stitch overlay pattern in the contrast ball. Pictured below is the Brimfield scarf that uses 4 balls for a basic scarf, or you can easily expand the pattern repeat in both width and length for a bold wrap! I called the scarf Brimfield as the soft palette I used here brought to mind a favorite antique flea market local to us here in Massachusetts.

I like the idea of grouping the Minikins in curated palettes, making a pack that is ready to go all within a single color theme. This idea birthed the Palette Packs. There are currently 7 Palette options at the time of this writing, but as we release new colors each season we'll expand even further the offerings. I took the Back to Basics pack and designed the Countdown Shawl (below), this takes the mini-gradients and breaks them into a striped pattern, so each gradient looks randomized into a stripe (I have a thing for stripes...!)

I've been seeing a lot of great designs coming from other designers out there. Check out the NeoViking Hat by DrawFour Designs, and the swoon-worthy Freia Polychroma Scarf by Amy Gunderson.

Having the same gradient in multiple different sized balls opens up a world of options. And as usual I find myself with more ideas than the time to knit them. I've yet to get around to the sweater  re-knit that prompted this new yarn, but someday... someday...!