Transatlantic Name Calling

Last week, all eleven new Heilo colors arrived.  What fun! Delving into that colorful pile of woolly goodness brought back memories of leaping into piles of freshly-raked leaves and revelling in nature’s colors or filling goodie bags from the candy store’s long bank of jelly bean bins and delighting in all the tasty combinations. Oh, the colorwork possibilities!

Two of the “new” colors are returning friends: you’ve seen white 0010 and wine 4246 before.

heilo wine 4246

They’re old favorites which were discontinued for a while, only because they were so beloved that they were sold out.  Now, they’re back; hopefully, for a nice, long stay.

Some of the allegedly new colors will seem very familiar – even suspiciously familiar!

Heilo yarn at Kidsknits.com

From the top left, we have the new orange red 3237 – a slightly less saturated version of old, discontinued burnt orange 3418, to the right.  In the middle, on the left, we have the new sunglow 2126 – again, a slightly less saturated version of old, discontinued gold (aka goldenrod) 2427.  On the bottom, that’s the new asparagus 9145, which is – you guessed it – slightly less saturated than the old fern green 9155.  Smart cookies like you see a pattern developing here, yes?

So, why move to the softer, less saturated colors?  First of all, they’re more wearable.  For instance, if you walk down Park Avenue in a sweater knit entirely out of the old gold 2427, people might try to flag you down for a ride; make it out of the  softer sunglow and not only will folks stop calling you “taxi!!!!”, but you’ll also have a more flattering sweater that will go with more things. Plus, the sunglow, orange red and asparagus are still lively enough that they’ll happily “pop” in your colorwork.  And, they’ll even play nicely with some of the truly new, more muted colors, below:

Heilo yarn at Kidsknits.com

Here we have petrol 7062 (above left), light steel blue 6642, (bottom left), plum smoke 5062 (top right) and orchid 5042 (bottom right).  Wonderful, wonderful colors, but rather odd names.  Yes, that really is a photo of yarns that really do have those official Dale of Norway color names.  But, if you’re surprised by how much green there is in light steel blue, or you’re wondering if all the orchids in Norway are as greyish looking as this orchid, you’re not alone.   Apparently, these colors were given their English names many months ago, by someone who had only seen a pdf of a digital photo showing these colors; it was much later that the actual yarns hit the American shore and American eyes.

Which brings me to the ultimate “great color, weird name” mismatch:

Heilo yarn at Kidsknits.com

On the far right, at the top, we have…drumroll, please…dark salmon 4624.  Oh, yes we do!  Whadyamean, it’s there, really, it’s right there, right above the ever-popular blossom pink 4203.  Oh, okay, so that color might have a lot more in common with your raspberry sorbet dessert than your (dark) salmon appetizer. And, yes, you would be entirely in the right to return any Norwegian salmon that showed up at your table looking that pink.  Perhaps it’s more the color of that lovely rose between your date’s teeth?  Anyway, it really is a beautiful color.  Just stick with the numbers and you’ll do fine.

When they don’t have to rely upon distorted, third-hand, transatlantic photos, it seems the folks at Dale US can quite adeptly  name their colors. The middle color on the left is their new mist 2425, which came out last year in Baby Ull so, apparently, they had a better peek at that one before naming it, for it truly is reminiscent of the lightest grey seen in the mist on a foggy morning.  Just for comparison sake, it’s sitting between the old standby, light sheep heather 2931 (top) and the classic sand heather 0004 (bottom).  For further comparison, in the middle, we have natural 0020 on top, off-white 0017 (newly discontinued) in the middle and the happily-returning white 0010 on the bottom. “White” – hmmm, now there’s a color name we can agree upon!

Chrysanthemum Mittens and the Mystery of Hauk vs Heilo

Like ‘em? I’ve just finished my Chrysanthemum Mittens, above. I designed these to be knit in Dale of Norway Hauk yarn, which is essentially good old Heilo 100% Norwegian sport weight wool that’s gone high tech with a Teflon infusion to make the yarn especially water and stain resistant. The Teflon even makes the yarn slightly softer. And it knits at exactly the same gauge as Heilo. So Hauk is a perfect alternative for stain-prone comfort seekers like me. It’s great stuff – I love it!

By using needles a couple of sizes smaller than I’d normally use for sport weight yarn, I ended up with especially dense, warm fabric that I’m really happy with for mittens. But just how much of this yarn we need for these mittens is another question.

I used 1 ball of each color (black, barn red and natural) and ended up with a generous bit of the black left over, tons of barn red left over and a downright stingy four feet of the natural left over. It was a close call, too close for my taste. It’s all too easy to imagine knitting just a wee bit looser and running out of the 1 ball of natural before finishing up. I’m figuring kits to make 1.999 mittens might not be terribly popular . So, it’s time to look further into a question that’s been bothering me for a while now: Do Hauk and Heilo really have the same yardage???

According to the ball bands, they do. Like all Dale yarns, both Heilo and Hauk are put up as 50g balls. Both say they provide 100 meters. But I wonder if that’s precisely true, or merely an approximation, or…perhaps, not even so approximate an approximation.

Given: Heilo + Teflon = Hauk. Assume the 50g does truly stay constant. I’m no chemist, but last I heard, Teflon is not weightless. So, as Teflon is infused into the yarn in the dye bath, it increases the wool’s weight, right? So I’m betting there’s a proportionate decrease in the yardage per 50g ball. Is it so slight a change that there’s no sense in changing the yardage numbers? Or is there more to it?

Having made the first mitten in my second pair ofChrysanthemum Mittens, this time in Heilo, I’m taking a look at what I have left so far in the natural and it seems that I’ve got considerably more natural left with the Heilo than I did with the Hauk. Granted, I’m just going on memory at this halfway point. I’ll report back to you when the second one is done. It will be interesting to see just how much more, if any, of the Heilo natural there is to compare with my 4 feet of Hauk. Any guesses? Stay tuned!