To the next level with Noro
Yep, sure enough Mr. Knits’ brother just sent his daughter back to school last week. It’s time to start thinking about projects for Autumn and for the coming Holidays that will wind down the year 2021. Hey, a good blanket or sweater takes a while to knit, right? Start it up now, it’ll be small while it’s hot, and get bigger as the weather cools.
Soon we will see colors of nature in varying degrees throughout North America and the rest of the northern hemisphere. Many trees will change colors several times before shedding those leaves. The kaleidoscope differs with each variety of tree showing off different shades of colors.
If you’ve seen that, you have a good idea what it’s like to knit with Noro colorways. As Master Eisaku Noro put it: “We aim to reproduce the colors of nature in our yarns: leaves for example, all look green, but in reality they come in countless variations of green. By mixing colors we can give our yarns more natural feeling colors reminiscent of oceans, mountains, flowers, trees and so on.” We see it like going on a long walk and having the terrain change beneath your feet from rocks to soil to wildflowers to grass to sand to water. You don’t have control over that terrain, but it makes for a nice walk.
Mrs. Knits calls it the “joy of surprise” that keeps her knitting just one more row to see the pink pop into a charcoal and the hand of thick vs thin textures that float across her needles with glee. Noro takes seemingly unrelated colors like a pink into green and then a shock of charcoal that one would find strange to combine. Yet it works. The vision is to take the eye from the bottom of the ocean to the tip of a mountain into the sky.
Noro’s fibers were ecologically friendly decades before it was in vogue. As Master Noro describes them: “Natural fibers have great features that humans can not mimic. I want to leave these features as much as possible in my yarns. If I make wool yarn, I use various lengths and thicknesses of wool fibers to try to reproduce the nature of sheep itself in our yarn: such as unevenness and coarseness. These natural states are intentionally left by using human hands and old machinery so that natural fibers are not over processed. All of this is so knitters can feel nature more closely when knitting with Noro yarns. Impurities in the raw materials are carefully removed by hand without the use of chemical treatment which is not good for the fibers or the environment.”
So Mr. & Mrs. Knits now invite you to experience Noro’s World of Nature right here, as we open our online Noro store. We have a gorgeous selection of yarns worthy of your Autumn knitting projects including Kureyon, Miyabi, Ito, Okunoshima, Tsubame, and more! The latter 3 come in jumbo balls, which means you need less of them, and more importantly, less ends to join. Now THAT’s Happy Knitting!
