The wrath of Irene

The flooding from Irene has caused great devastation in Vermont, the state where I (Kelly) grew up. The people of Vermont have lost big parts of hundreds of roads, and many, many bridges were destroyed, including several historic covered bridges.

Here is a part of the road that my family used every day to go to work, school, and even the grocery store. This road abuts the Cold River, so there was more than this one wash out along the 10 miles we used to travel.

It is going to take a long time for this little state to recover. Homes and businesses were destroyed and damaged, along with all the roads and bridges. I grew up with the owner of Wilk's Paving, pictured below:

Although I now call North Carolina "Home" (well really anywhere my DH resides is home for me :)), seeing all the pictures and videos of Vermont, after Irene, has brought tears to my eyes and lumps in my throat. I have seen pictures of disaster many times before, but seeing places under water and torn apart, that I knew as a child and young adult, make this storm much more personal.

As you all might know, we donate 5% of our net profits to charity every year, so Laura and I decided this is a good time to put some of that money to work. We know that other states have suffered great damage due to Irene, including many counties in the Eastern part of our beautiful state, North Carolina, so we chose to donate $1000 to the Red Cross. Since it is an international organization, we are sure they will find a good place to spend our donation to help people in need no matter where they are, including Vermont.

We want to also take this time to thank all of our customers for their support of The Unique Sheep. If not for you, we would not be able to make this generous donation. 

Warm, fuzzy and hand painted HUGS to all of you....

Kelly and Laura

New Pattern: Bashful Butterflies

We are so pleased to announce the release of this new shawlette pattern! It can be knit with one of our Fingering Weight Sock Sets (the sample is in Sushi Socks) or 200g of Pima Petite. Julia is an up-and-coming designer from the UK; you can see more of her designs on Ravelry.

Canadian Post

Canadian Customers,
Due to the Canadian Post strike and lock out it is unclear when packages sent to Canadian addresses will arrive. If you would like for us to send your package using a different shipping method (i.e. UPS, FedEx, etc) or hold your package until the lock out is over please let us know. There may be an extra charge for shipping but we'll handle it on a case by case basis. You can email us at laura@theuniquesheep.com or include a comment with your order to let us know what you'd like us to do!

Laura & Kelly

Come See us at the Carolina Fiber Fest this weekend!

The Unique Sheep will have a booth at the Carolina Fiber Fest in Raleigh this weekend, May 20-22. This is our first year doing this festival and they have a great line up of vendors, teachers and speakers. We will have lots of Gradiance yarns, of course, and may even pull out our Serendipity basket with odds and ends of our yarns at deep discounts. Laura will be driving all the way from her new home in Kentucky for the event so come out and say hello! This will be our last event before our Retreat in August so don't miss it!

Extra Yarn

Many of our customers have been knitting Susan Pandorf's In Dreams shawl using one of our Gradiance sets. Unfortunately Susan has announced that if they ordered 4oz they may run short near the end. Susan has posted alternate instructions for completing the shawl with the original 4oz on her website. This is the recommended strategy if you fear you are going to run out of yarn. If you'd like to continue with the original pattern, however, and order an additional 1oz skein of yarn to add to your 4oz Gradiance you can order these extra skeins for Eos or for Marici on our website. When you order, please let us know which end of the colorway you want your extra skein added to. Handdyed yarn is, by its nature, unique and varies significantly from batch to batch. Because of this we cannot guarantee that the extra skein we dye will match your original set. For that reason we suggest that you use the alternate instructions and stick with the original 4 oz, but we are leaving that decision up to you!

The Phoenix and The Carpet Mystery KAL

We are excited to announce our next mystery lace KAL- The Phoenix and the Carpet! Find out more on our website.

Yarn for Susan Pandorf's Lothlorien Cape

Susan Pandorf just revealed her stunning Lothlorien Cape pattern and guess what? She used Unique Sheep's Wild Thing yarn for it! Wild Thing is a really nice yarn that doesn't get much attention because its DK and DK yarns just don't seem to be that popular right now. But if you've been drowning in miles of laceweight and fingering weight yarn you'll welcome the extra heft of this soft, smooth silk/merino blend. Its a great choice for cables because it has great stitch definition and the thickness of the yarn makes the cables nice and plump.

We collaborated with Susan to create the Nature Walk Gradiance colorway just for this pattern, but I'm sure it would look lovely in other colors as well. Because it calls for an unusual amount of yarn we have set up a special listing on the website to make sure you get exactly what you need for this project!