When Yarn Misbehaves: A Cautionary Tale
Something that I feel is important as a designer is to acknowledge that all designs can be improved. There’s nothing wrong with them, but for me as I grow as a knitter I often find a way to refine one of my patterns.
Last year though I embarked on a series of pattern revamps for slightly different reasons. The first was that some of my designs weren’t shining. The yarn I’d used was, but the design detail wasn’t really visible. I’d go out wearing the pattern sample and people would tell me they loved it and then they’d look closer and say “oh I didn’t realise the pattern was nice too.” As a designer, that’s a bit of a kick in the teeth! And when I looked at the pattern sales and their stats across all platforms, this vibe was reflected there too!
But also as a consequence of wearing the samples I got to find out where the structure could be improved to ensure a scarf held its shape better after being worn a few times/chucked in a drawer! After all I need to know that structurally they can be enjoyed for years to come.
I’m pleased to say this all proved to be a good move. People began commenting on the pattern not the yarn, people who had favourited the pattern previously bought the pattern and the structures are more solid.
So bolstered by this success I decided that I’d continue this process over the next couple of years. And just before Christmas I cast on the revamped version of my Something For The Big Weekend pattern using a yarn that I had used for my other 4 ply pattern revamps.
Now even if I use the same yarn, but in a different shade I always gauge swatch. You might think that’s not necessary, but as the daughter of a dye scientist who also knitted, I was warned about how different colour dyes can affect the yarn in terms of saturation and drape. So for me this is something I take the time to do and the gauge swatch in this instance was fine.
It knitted up exactly as I would have expected. The alternating stockinette sections combined with twisted eyelets looked fine and well structured, but as with all these types of designs it required blocking.
So I blocked it. And that, dear readers, is where it all went wrong.
As soon as I lifted it out of the sink I knew there was a problem. Some of the eyelets seemed huge and the bottom looked skewed. Bearing in mind I have knitted this structure and twisted eyelets so many times and the fact that I was checking and annotating each row for the pattern revamp, I knew it wasn’t anything I’d done. But I thought I’d pin it out, let it dry and hopefully that might sort it. It didn’t!
So I went all Miss Marple to find out what had happened.
This pattern takes approx. 170g/700m of 4ply yarn as does my Big Drop pattern which was done in the same yarn (different shade) and is the same size. That one blocked out fine so it wasn’t a weight or size issue.
There was no visible impairment to the yarn when I knitted it or when I frogged the sample. I got the same number of wraps around my ruler for each ball so it wasn’t that one was thinner or there were sections of fragility as far as I could see. They all weighed the same!
I even cast on a small section on smaller needles to see of that helped when it was blocked. It didn’t.
I’d swatched, I’d used the same size needles as I had for other projects, I used smaller needles to see if that improved it, I’d compared to similar projects where I’d used similar patterns or were a similar size and I have no idea what went wrong. All I know is that I had 840m of 4ply yarn that I didn’t trust because it just didn’t want behave! And I think it’s important to acknowledge that sometimes (thankfully not often) yarn just doesn’t do what we expect it to do.
And that’s okay (if not very annoying!) because yarn is a marvellous resource and as I am very much in camp “Waste not, want not,” it would be used for something else. And yet I didn’t want to consign this amount of yarn to my scrappy aran blanket stash (where I hold as many strands of yarn together as is necessary to create an aran weight yarn to knit into a king size blanket). Instead I had a cunning plan! I looked at my new pattern list for this year and looked at the DK patterns.
Now whilst this won’t make it to actual pattern sample status, I do really like the colour and there is one pattern on the list where I already know that I want to knit a few versions just for me.
So having steamed out the yarn perm after frogging, and holding two strands of the yarn together and using slightly smaller needles than would is usually called for, I started knitting a version of what will eventually become my new DK Scarf Number 2 pattern later this year. And this pattern is similar to my Scarf Number 1 pattern that I revamped last year.
It’s knitting up well…yes, I know it did before…and I can’t wait to get this ready for my autumn wardrobe this year. I might just ask for your thoughts and prayers though when I come to block to it!
Let me know if this has ever happened to you?
Oh yeah. Sometimes the yarn just wants to be something else.
I'm thinking that this yarn likes to be all snuggled up together, no eyelets or lace for him.