Morehouse Merino

I absolutely love Morehouse Merino lace designs. Their shawls and scarves are minimalistic, textural, modern, and innovative - everything I love in knitwear design.

However, I really don't like their yarns. They do have their great points: the variegated colorways are beautiful and they do their best to keep the wool in its natural state (read: they don't carbonize out the VM). What I don't like about them is the randomly-occurring coarseness of the wool (I don't know why - their dye process, maybe?) and their lace yarn is not plied.

The last part is what I have a real problem with. I have been indoctrinated to believe that singles are unsuitable for lace knitting, because of their natural energized state. It makes the lace crumple up so you have to block it over and over. Supposedly, the most suitable yarn for lace knitting is a worsted-spun two-ply.

I'm as iconoclastic as the next person so I'm perfectly willing to knit lace with singles to test that rule, and Morehouse designs seem to be designed to sort of be crushy and crumply, which I like. What is difficult if not impossible to work around is the fragility of singles, especially Morehouse Merino singles. Many of the designs are also heavily dependent on wide multi-stitch-width dropped sections, which leaves the poor yarn exposed to the elements. If during the course of wear there's a break in the yarn, it could affect the entire structural integrity of the piece.

But I'm just speculating. I'm thinking of buying a kit just to see how it goes. If these designs are actually structured in a way that the singles are more-or-less protected, they might be really great spindle projects: spin a spindle full, knit the single until I run out of yarn, spin up another spindle full, splicing the end of the new spindle to the end of the knitting. No ends to weave in!

That's incredibly exciting for someone like me: I loathe finishing. I want my projects to spring fully-formed from my needles like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, and I will go to extreme lengths to achieve that.