West Yorkshire Spinners – The Butterflies Collection

Well, today is an exciting day and it feels like I’ve been keeping the secret for ever!  There’s a brand new collection of Signature 4ply yarn from West Yorkshire Spinners called The Butterflies, and it’s fluttering into the shops from today … and before you ask – of course there’s a new sock pattern to go with them!

Aren’t they lovely?  These six additions to the Signature 4ply range have been a long time in the making as WYS worked hard to get the colours just right – but they have been worth the wait!

The illustrations in this post were produced by West Yorkshire Spinners and all the photos were taken either by West Yorkshire Spinners or by me – it’ll be pretty obvious which ones are mine 🙂

Don’t those swatches look pretty?  Each one is created for a British butterfly and I’ll show you them all a bit later on.  The way the yarn is dyed is not quite the same as the British birds yarns, but when you knit with them you can see that there is a similarity that connects them and I like that very much.

Here’s my carefully curated ( 😉 ) image of the yarns from when WYS sent them to me earlier this year …

Oh, no careful placement of the balls here!  They were tipped out of the bag the courier brought almost before the man had left the driveway and Astrid was straight in there to supervise!  I’m telling you – if they had been sweeties, I would have gobbled them up!  These yarns were quite the surprise, you see … I knew that they were in production and I’d helped with some sampling for an earlier version, but this was the first time I had seen the finished product and they were quite different to the last version that I’d looked at.  Because everything about WYS yarn development is a closely guarded secret, I wasn’t expecting a delivery at all but as soon as I got hold of that squishy parcel, I knew immediately what it would be and I couldn’t wait to see them – and once the parcel was open, I couldn’t stop looking at them!

“Choose whichever colour you like to design with,” WYS said to me, when we spoke about a sock pattern for these new yarns.  Well!  I don’t need to tell you that there was one that shouted very loudly to me! 💜  To be fair, though, I did stop to think about which colour might photograph the best for the pattern photos and I did briefly consider Red Admiral as we we have those in our garden … but red can be such a temperamental colour to photograph sometimes whereas purple is very well-behaved … that’s my story and I’m sticking to it! 🙂

I don’t know if you noticed but there’s a difference between the ball bands on my first-off-the-machine balls and the ones that will be in the shops today.  Those ball bands have the yarn colourway printed on the front of the ball band and a photo of a knitted swatch on the side – it’s such a good idea!  I had no idea of how the yarn was going to knit up from the balls that arrived with me and I honestly expected stripes like the bird yarns.

I was very wrong!  Instead, there are stripes but they are much softer as each stripe is one main colour but speckled with another to give an interesting variegated-but-striped yarn and I was delighted to see how it was turning out as I was knitting it.

Here’s the pattern that I have designed for this yarn … it’s called Flutter.  Do you like it?

It’s a surprisingly easy pattern to knit (even I was surprised how quickly these socks knitted up!) and I’ll tell you a bit more about it in a minute.  You will also, I’m sure, be delighted to know that it’s a free pattern and I’ll link that below.

Let me show you the yarns first then you can decide if there’s a colourway that shouts very loudly to you, too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you think? Could you see yourself in a pair of socks in these yarns? Or something else, as Signature 4ply is not just for socks 😉  I think it’s very clever how the colours are blended together in the stripes – stripes and variegation in one ball!

If you’re new to the blog or to West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4ply yarn, you might wonder what all the fuss is about.  Just another sock yarn?  Not at all!  I have been a long-time fan of West Yorkshire Spinners yarn and the company itself, even before I started working with them back in 2017.  Their yarns are spun from British fleece, they employ local people and they’re an all-round lovely family-owned company and I am very proud to be associated with them.  Signature 4ply is an excellent yarn for socks as it’s good quality and good value (you’ll get plenty of wear out of these socks!) and most importantly – as someone who helps beginners to get their first pairs on their feet – it’s very forgiving for early pairs of socks when you might unravel more than more experienced sock knitters.  I think that patterned yarn, whether striped or variegated, is always easier to knit with for first pairs than a plain yarn as the colour changes encourage you onwards – and whether this new yarn collection would be for a first or a 100th pair of socks, I think it would make a fabulous choice!

Did you like the butterfly illustrations?  WYS have a very talented illustrator who produces all of their “spotter guide” pictures (you’ll see similar images on the Country Birds patterns) and I love the hand-drawn style rather than a photo.  The butterflies are all very pretty, aren’t they?  We get Red Admirals and Small Tortoiseshells in our garden, but I have never seen the others – I’ve never heard of a Chalkhill Blue or a Green Hairstreak!  Maybe you have them where you live?  I know they are definitely British butterflies as I saw the guide book on the desk when I was up at the WYS offices one time, and it was quite a big book so there are obviously far more British butterflies than I get to see in our garden.

I have noticed a few butterflies starting to appear in the garden now so this is obviously the perfect time for a butterfly-themed yarn collection … and a sock pattern!  Let me tell you a bit more about Flutter …

As soon as I saw this stitch pattern, I could see butterfly wings!  It called out to me as loudly as the gorgeous purple yarn and I think the two go together beautifully.

The pattern goes all around the leg for all the sizes (the pattern is written for four adult sizes) and there’s a feature panel of twisted stitches down the back of the leg.  The heel stitch heel flap will be familiar if you’ve knitted my sock patterns before (and if you’re brand new to socks, here are the Winwick Mum Sockalong tutorials to help you) …

and the pattern flows down over the gusset and onto the foot where it ends in a point so that the rest of the foot can be knitted plain to show off the yarn.

This is not an oddly-shaped sock, this is the result of me wrestling with adjustable sock blockers to try to show you the top of the foot where the pattern comes to a point! 🙂

The pattern is created using twisted stitches – I’ve used them many times in my patterns over the years and I love the way they create an easy cable twist over two stitches without needing a cable needle.  If you’ve never tried this sort of stitch before, you’re going to love it!  I found the pattern easy to memorise and great for TV watching if you need a straight-forward knit after a long day.  I’d even go so far as to say that they’re a quick and impressive-looking knit for gifts as we all like to show off our sock skills when we’re knitting for others!

I wear my hand knits all year round when I’m walking the dog so it’s never the “wrong” season for socks for me, and I think I might need a pair of these for myself!  Not so small daughter has recently joined the socks’n’Birks tribe and I think these Flutter socks would look fabulous with her shoes … it’s probably just as well that WYS has this pair of socks now or I could see them disappearing from our house! 🙂

Ooh, as a final note – what I do want to add about the yarn is that the speckles in each stripe may change slightly depending on stitch count and pattern stitch so don’t worry if it does that to you.  It does happen with variegated yarns sometimes, it’s just one of the idiosyncrasies of the way it’s dyed.  I know some people get concerned about this (me included) and this is one of the things that WYS and I spoke about in an earlier incarnation of this yarn, but I can tell you that WYS have worked hard to get the dyeing just right and my experience when knitting the Flutter socks was that even if the yarn speckles changed slightly on a stripe, they did it on both socks as I started at the same place in the ball so they still matched.  You can see what happened when I changed from the pattern to the plain knitting section on the foot if you go back up to that photo.  I would absolutely wear these socks myself and I always need my socks to match!

The Flutter pattern is FREE, a gift from West Yorkshire Spinners, and you can download a copy from yarn shop websites, the WYS website, the Winwick Mum shop and by clicking the link below:

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PATTERN

 

It’s a big document with lots of photos, butterfly images and both written instructions and charts for the socks, but the lovely thing about downloads is that you can choose what you need to print out – if anything at all if you can read it online.

And there we are!  Quite some excitement for a Wednesday in June, and the best sort of excitement as well, in my totally biased opinion 🙂

The yarn is available from today from yarn shops both online and local – click here for West Yorkshire Spinners stockists – and from the WYS website as well.

I do hope you enjoy the pattern and The Butterflies yarn – as I said earlier, it’s not just for socks so you might have other ideas for it as well!  This yarn would work really well as a hat, scarf or cowl, and all of those knit up quickly – don’t forget that there are some shawl and cowl patterns on the blog which you might think would be just the thing! 🙂

Do let me know what you think!