Manos del Uruguay is our most popular yarn--and no wonder. It makes cozy sweaters and jackets, delightful hats, quick and wonderful scarves, luscious throws. It's soft and warm, easy to work with, and the colors are like nothing else: the kettle-dyeing process yields shades and tones that are dark, pale, bright, or muddy, but always subtly (or not-so-subtly) striated. And because it's hand-spun, the texture and thickness vary a bit as well. Just as we want our knitting to look professional but still obviously hand-made, we love the way Manos shows the work of human hands.
Moreover, we feel good about supporting the producers of Manos, a cooperative organization committed to developing work for women in the countryside of Uruguay. Today 17 individual cooperatives support a total of approximately 350 artisans: 25 spinners and 15 dyers produce the yarn, while others weave and knit blankets and garments sold in Manos-owned and -operated stores in Uruguay.
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If you've never worked with Manos before, or never even seen it up close, there are some things you need to know about the color selection here. First, there are no dye lots, because all the colors vary (some more, some less) from skein to skein and even within each skein. To ensure that your project is even in color, we recommend buying all the yarn at once, and working with two skeins at a time, alternating two rows of Skein A with two rows of Skein B to blend any variation. Second, even the so-called "solid" colors are more-or-less variegated: some with streaks of much lighter or darker shades, some with just a hint of tonal striation. This isn't a defect; it's part of the beauty of the yarn. Fabrics knit with Manos have a level of complexity that no mill-spun yarn can duplicate. Third, the slight thick-and-thin variation in the yarn is especially kind to new knitters, because it camouflages any unevenness in the knitter's tension.
The knitty-gritty, as it were: Manos del Uruguay is put up in 100-gram skeins, each of which has approximately 137 yards. It's 100% wool (a blend of Corriedale and Merino). It knits to a gauge of about 4 sts per inch on a US #9 needle for sweaters and hats and so forth; 3.5 sts per inch on a #10 is also good for scarves. The large bales you see in some of our photos are "kilos," bundles of 10 skeins as they're shipped to us from Design Source, the U.S. distributor. We open them as we need to: you're welcome to a kilo, but you're also welcome to 1 skein or 3 or however many your project requires. The solid colors are $13.00 (plus $1.25 shipping), the multis are $15.00 (same shipping), and the way to tell whether a color is officially "solid" or "multi" is by number: numbers over 100 are multis; numbers below 100, and letters, are solids.
We're committed to stocking all of the colors, all the time.
If you're looking for more ideas for projects, you can find sweater and jacket patterns in the Design Source collections, or afghan patterns in the Design Source Book of Home Decor (16 afghans and throws, plus pillows) or the Four Seasons Throw leaflet (a variety of different stitch patterns assembled four different ways).
Welcome to the world of Manos!
