Handspun Yarn: January 2007 Archives
In scientific publishing, there's the concept of the "Least Publishable Unit". Because scientists are often judged by the number of publications to their record, it's sometimes seen as advantageous to publish your data in the smallest possible chunks that you can still put together as a story. Today's post might seem like I'm trying to mark out the "Least Bloggable Unit" given that the information would have fit very neatly with yesterday's post and that I had originally put everything together to be part of the same post. But that's not really the intention. As I was thinking about it, I decided that the spinning and the swatching were really two different stories, they just happened to involve the same yarn. That, and at the end of the day, this blog is still my fibery journal, and I wanted a little more time to think about the swatch that I'm going to talk about today.
After spinning the main skein, I had enough single left on one bobbin to spin up about 42 yards of 2-ply that I could use to swatch with. My first thoughts for a use for the yarn had been some fingerless mitts of my own design -- not because there aren't a lot of other lovely examples out there, but because I love to use small projects as templates to try things out. Somehow, if the experiement doesn't go well with a small project, the ripping process doesn't feel quite as painful and it's not hard for me to get started trying something else out.
I've talked before about the differences between 2-ply and 3-ply yarn, and since I was thinking about combining cables and lace in my mitts, I thought this would be a good opportunity to swatch and see how each type of pattern looked in the yarn. And while I know that the yarn has both silk and angora content, the information I have for the roving doesn't give me percentages to work with, so I wasn't completely sure what to expect from the yarn in terms of drape and elasticity.
I determined that the yarn I made came in around 14 WPI -- which made it a light DK. So I picked up a set of US 5 (3.75 mm) needles and cast on to see what the swatch would tell me. After knitting the swatch, I soaked and blocked it to see if washing would have any effect on the final fabric.
On plain stockinette, I get about 5.5 stitches/inch and a soft fabric that I like both the look and feel of. It has a reasonable amount of drape, and a reasonable amount of structure. Important, because I don't want floppy drapey mitts. So the size 5 needle was a decent call. Though, in a pinch, this yarn is probably fine enough to go down to a 4 if I wanted a denser fabric.
The next section I tried was a simple lace pattern. Anyone who has worked on my most recent sock pattern will recognize the Cat's Paw lace pattern -- it was the one I could remember easily without having to refer to a pattern book, and was actually a small enough motif to consider for a pair of mitts. I consider the lace results to be just okay. The fuzziness of the yarn muddies the lace definition a little bit, so I don't think anything complicated would show up very well. But it's doable.
The final section of the swatch is a couple of simple cables. I think I made a mistake with something in the cable on the right, which is why the close up focuses on the simple 6-stitch cable on the left. I was initially worried that this yarn, given that it's both two ply and made up of some not very elastic fibers, wouldn't be a good candidate for cabling. The swatch changed my mind completely. The cable definitely has a less three-dimensional quality than you might expect if I was working with a 3-ply yarn, but the cable still has nice definition and the flatter texture is probably a bonus for a pair of mits that I want to lay flat against my hands and not get caught on things while I work at my computer (my computer room gets quite cold during the day in the winter, and I find that my mouse hand is almost always ice cold if I spend the day working at home).
On the overall, I consider this swatch a success. I like the hand of the final fabric, and it looks like I'll have no problem with simple lace and cable textures. I can wear the fabric against my skin without irritation and I like that there is no terribly obvious striping. I think the tweedy quality adds to the final product without distracting too much from the knitted design. I am still frustrated with my camera's inability to reproduce the color of this yarn in a way that does not make it look like a sickly aqua, but hopefully by the time I have something interesting to show with this yarn again, I'll have figured out how to deal with that.
So the next step is for me to dig through some stitch dictionaries, doodle in my little paper journal, and figure out what I want to do on the small canvas of handknit fingerless mitts.
