It is Knitting and Crochet Blog week, and today’s topic is one of the loveliest supplies I could imagine: yarn!
It’s difficult to chose a favorite yarn. As Princess Anne begins her pat speech in Roman Holiday, “…each in its own way…” Yet there have been some standouts. Foremost is the yarn that Scout custom dyed for me for my wedding shawl. The Zephyr wool-silk is a great beginner’s lace weight. It’s not as sticky as Kid Silk Haze, but it is sticky enough to enable the novice lace knitter some leeway when trying to fix a dropped stitch. I wouldn’t generalize lace weight yarns as workhorses, but Zephyr really is!
Selecting a yarn I’ve disliked is more challenging. If I don’t like a yarn, I shun it quickly. Life, as the cliche goes, is too short to knit with less-than-fabulous yarns. The one thing that comes to mind also reveals me for the yarn snob I am: squeaky acrylic. A few years back I had a lot of fun making amigurumi, and I purchased yarn that didn’t feel or smell like yarn should. I hated every moment of working with it, but I wanted to make my crazy octopus princess. As soon as she was completed, I threw the remaining yarn into a bag to donate!
How about you, yarny? What would your tale of two yarns include? The good? The bad? The beautiful? The ugly?
Ack to the Ack-krylic. Gives me the ebee-geebees. Cute octopus though. Is that a Puzzle ring you’re wearing topped with a diamond? We used to have those as kids. Got them from Turkey.
What a great question. I’m going to have to think about this. I have yarns that I’ve loved when I worked with them and then they didn’t wear well. There are other yarns that I hated working with and still hated after I finished them.
I’m going to go through my Ravelry list to figure it out 🙂
ooh tough question! i’ll have to think about it some more.
there are good acrylics and bad acrylics. toss vanna’s choice in the washer & dryer and it is very very soft.
One question I can answer is a yarn that didn’t live up to the hype for me was a skein of STR. That one skein did not impress me and I will eventually acquire a second one to be able to say one way or the other. But I’m not rushing to try it.
The yarn I’m loving most right now is some Madelinetosh Light in the most beautiful forest green handdye (semisolid) with lavender “blossoms” (bits) every so often.
Are these my absolute favourites and most hated yarns? No. I’ll keep thinking and review projects to see what I can come up with.
I love anything dyed by my friends – Kim and Judy come to mind right away but there are so many others! As for dislike, I’m not too crazy about mass produced acrylic.