Hiraeth has now been retired, and is no longer available to buy direct from Hilltop Cloud.

Hiraeth is my homage to Wales. It's where I've lived for the past 5 years, and is also where I spent a great deal of time on holiday. It's a beautiful place, so this is a collection inspired by the landscape of this small country.

Hiraeth as a theme has inspired a huge number of artists over the years. It's a Welsh word with no direct English translation. (However, it is worth pointing out that the Welsh have no word for their own national sport, and instead Welshify the English word Rugby, in to Rygbi!) Roughly speaking it means a longing for the Wales of the past. It’s sometimes described as homesickness or sadness of memory. 

I think it's a feeling a great many of us have for certain areas in the world, wether it's due to family, or just a sense that the landscape somehow speaks to your soul.

You can buy the collection here

Ynys Mon

Anglesey is described as the breadbasket of Wales. 
Fertile wheat fields ripple in the summer sunshine.
Image from here

Dinorwic

Where once men and machinery ate at the mountain, darkness falls. 
The slate quarries are now silent, but ghosts remain.

Traeth

Wales has 870 miles of coastline. The beaches and shorelines are the most beautiful I know of. 
The tide flows out, exposing dark sand, blue sky, and scudding grey clouds.

Pendragon

Land of myth and magic. Uther Pendragon is the father of King arthur, the legendary leader of historic Britain. Now the dragon flies proudly over Wales

The Valleys

Blackened by the toils of men, with flashing white smiles. 
The valleys of South Wales powered the industrial revolution.

Image from here

Sunset

Looking down the valley on a grey winters day. 
The sun sinks, the sky lights up, all too briefly before darkness falls.

Blue Lagoon

Where once men toiled, cutting away the rock, now there are only bottomless pools. 
Still waters run deep.

Rhos

In autumn the hills and moors change colour. 
Bracken dies back, grass withers. The fading light turns everything aglow.

Pembroke

The deep blue Atlantic meets sandy beaches where families play. 
Waves crash against the cliffs.

Sheep

The backbone of the Welsh economy. 
Not white as you might expect, instead an homage to te real source of the wealth; green fields and hedgerows.

Colour Combinations

Hiraeth was designed to be a collection of colours that worked well together, and that gave you options for stripes and colourwork items.

I sat down, and played around with scraps of yarn left over from the samples I spun. This is where the sample pack comes in handy; 20g will be enough to do something with if you combine some colours, but not so much that you end up with lots of fibre in a colour you're not that fond of.

If you are interedted in colourwork I can't recomned the Knitsonik Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook highly enough. Everything I skim over here she discusses in far more detail. Honestly, it's worth every penny, get Father Christmas to buy it for you.

One of the key things to successful stripes and colourwork motifs is contrast, you have to have enough contrast or the stripes and motifs won't stand out. This aspect isn't reliant on what colour the yarn is, instead it's related to it's value, how dark or light the yarn is. Though of course, how the colours look toegther is also a considerartion, that's partly personal taste though rather than colour theory.

Here's all the colours of Hiraeth.

For reference, from top left we have-
Blue Lagoon, Pembroke, Pendragon, Rhos, Sheep

and on the bottom from the left we have-
Dinorwic, Sunset, The Valleys, Ynys Mon, Traeth

One handy trick to work out if you have enough contrast is to take a photo and make it in to Black and White.

It might have been pretty easy to work out the darkest colours and the lightest, but what converting to black and white shows is that the middle colours can actually be split in to 2 groups with differing amounts of contrast.

The Green colour of Sheep is actually surprisingly light, certainly lighter than Rhos, which it's sat next to.

Here's the colours arranged in a rough light to dark order.

The orders with in the groups is slightly subjective, but overall I think there are 4 groupings of colours.

Darkest:
Pendragon, The Valleys, Dinorwic

Mid-Dark:
Blue Lagoon, Pembroke, Rhos

Mid-Light:
Ynys Mon, Sheep

Lighest:
Sunset, Traeth

As a rough guide, putting 2 colours together from the same group won't have enough contrast, and your motifs will get lost.

So while something in some autumnal yellow, orange with a bit of vibrant green might seem like a good idea, as soon as you look at them in black and white there's very little difference betwen the colours. 

Instead, for maximum effect, and in reality if you're doing colourwork you want to be able to see the work you've put in, you need to go for higher contrast.

If you like warm colours then a combination of Pendragon, Ynys Mon and Sunset work much better.

If cool colours are more your thing then Dinorwic, Blue Lagoon and Traeth look spectacular combined. This one if particularly nice as the blue hints in Dinorwic are the same blues as in Blue Lagoon, and the purple hints in Blue Lagoon come from Dinorwic.

There's just enough contrast between the two colours for it to be successful.

For a slightly more varied palette how about Orange and Purple, these two are a classic combination. I've put it together with Sunset here, but if you like a cooler paletter it would work with Traeth as well. 

Traeth and Sunset are both almost non-colours. Sunset is just a step away from beige, and Traeth is nearly grey, but I wanted to include both colours for just this reason. You need to have a variety of colours to work with when creating palettes, and the paler colours make the brighter shades pop. Because these colours are actually blends of many different shades they often work together surprisingly well. The pink of Sunset has some yellow in it, so can be paired with Ynys Mon really succesfully.

Black, of course, goes with everything, I've put it together with green here for a rather modern, punchy combination. You can just about get away with putting it with the red of Pendragon, though it will be subtle, the purple of Dinorwic is probably too dark however. For a twist on the classic of Black and White you could pair it with Traeth.

So, what colours would you put together, and what would you make with them? Get ambitious and create your dream project.