Rules for Feeding the Stash

Friday, January 15, 2016

The Yarn, It Calls to Me

I have a habit of picking up yarn at thrift stores. Whenever I see something that isn't 100% acrylic, I inevitably end up bringing it home with me. I've gotten a pretty decent variety of stuff this way-some Louet Euroflax, some Brown Sheep, a ball of Icelandic stuff-for just a couple dollars a ball.

There's been nine balls of Lion Brand Cotton Ease in one of the shops here in town for a couple of weeks, and I could only hold off so long before bringing the lot home. Now, I don't normally go for cotton or acrylic except in certain circumstances, and this yarn had me a bit baffled. It has most of the properties I'd associate with cotton, except it doesn't really stretch out like cotton has the tendency to-that would be the acrylic holding it in place.

It's not a fiber mixture I'd usually work with, but it's definitely a good lightweight blend-I have a store-bought summer sweater that's almost this exact fiber blend in a different weight. So there I was, with nine balls of yarn that I had no idea what to do with.

I was pretty sure I wanted a sweater, so I started in the Ravelry pattern database looking for adult sweaters in worsted weight. I went through every page of results, but I was hampered by the fact that I didn't really know how the yarn was going to behave. I knit a swatch, and it didn't tell me too much.

Then I moved onto the yarn page and pattern suggestions. I made it through every page of that before switching my search to "projects done in cotton ease that are adult sweaters." Then I went even further, into the general Ravelry database for "adult sweaters worsted weight in cotton or acrylic."

Through all that, one pattern continued to stand out to me-Que Sera. I'm not the first person to knit this sweater from this yarn, so that gives me some hope.

All that goes to say-I have approximately 20 other sweaters I should be working on before this one.


Whoops.

4 comments:

  1. I wish I could find yarn at thrift stores! Darn the luck.

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  2. whoa, a sweater's worth of yarn all in the same dye lot at a thrift shop? no way you could pass that up! The Que Sera will be an awesome summer cardi, for sure.

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  3. oh, gosh....that same 'whoops' happens to me all the time!!!!!!!!

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  4. That is a lovely pattern. I like how you described how you tried all the different searches on Ravelry, such a familiar search process to mine!

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