when swatching manages to be fun...

[sev]

mixing it all up:

subtly varigated deep magenta mohair in two textures: one ordinary, one boucle.  have what I suspect is 1200 yards of the ordinary stuff, noticeably less of the other.  Giant spool of slubby pink & black yarn that I've spoken of here before, and another giant spool of mustardy-gold thread (just gold colored; not metallic,  unfortunately). Orange-and-pink ladder ribbon, 600 yards.   Lavender/pink/pale orange one-ply probably-silk, also not lots. 

The weights and textures are all so different and it's definitely fun to knit them up in various ways and see what happens. 

 

First, on size 7s.  I ripped this out and re-used the yarn for a swatch on size 5s. The narrow part in the middle is a slip-stitch pattern. The bottom is stockinette, the top a chevron stitch half smooth, half garter-ridged, every 12 rows.  The verdict:  four-row stripes in plain stockinette are too weird; the transitions are jarring.  The slip-stitch pattern uses a lot of yarn to make some heavy fabric that mixes the yarns together nicely but I don't like the dense hand.  The chevron with ridges was too busy, but the flat parts were nice -- the increases and decreases made gaps that showed the ribbon a nd the slubs and the boucles off nicely. 

The hand of this fabric is nicer than stockinette on the size 7s, but some of the yarns -- like the ribbon yarn and the curly boucle kid mohair -- just don't shine in the tighter stitches.

On the upside, this is half made up of the more-plentiful non-curly mohair and the thin pink and yellow yarns I have large spools of. So there'll be lots of the novelty yarns left over even after a whole sweater and I can make more stuff out of the same collection of yarns on bigger needles. Not that I'm even starting it soon; I have to finish ella first.

And maybe I'll swatch the one-row stripes on 7s and see what I think.  I can always re-size the fitted cardigan I want to make to work with 4.5 sts/in instead of 5.

Oh, and:  As much as I've enjoyed and learned a great deal from  The Yarn Stash Workbook and Big Girl Knits, they're so different in philosophy that I've been really conflicted about *what* I want to knit with this pile of yarn.  TYSWB is all about boxy, square things in large gauge and stripes, stripes, stripes.  BGK is all about curvy fitted shaped things in fine gauge and warns of the dangers of stripes.  The one sweater in BGK that has big-girl-approved stripes (the Sandy Cardigan) is definitely more complex than I want to tackle right now -- and I just finished months of one-row stripes in garter stitch with the ruana (which is lovely; I'll need to post pictures soon) and this set of yarns looks better in stockinette than garter..  But I have -- and probably always will have -- this magpie nature that means I end up with small quantities of yarn I adore, and I love mixing them together (and thus my love affair with TYSWB).  *And* I love varigated yarn, which ends up with much of a stripey effect all on its own.  So, one of the goals of the mad swatching was to find a stitch pattern that was maybe not so boldly striped. 

Or, some day I'll find a pattern for a cardigan that's 1) fitted 2) in stockinette or something comparably smooth and 3) makes the stripes not horizontal.

In the meantime, I'll play.

Comments

[firecat]

I love Big Girl Knits but think a lot of their fashion advice is too rigid.

I have the magpie yarn nature too. Could you knit a shawl or shrug with the yarns?