Yarn, yarn, yarn

   When you go to buy yarn for a new project, there are some things you should pay attention to. First things we notice are colour and texture of the yarn. But besides these, there are a couple of things to be taken into account: the thickness and yarn type.

   The thickness of the yarn will be in accordance with the needles size to use. It will affect both the finish of the garment and the time needed to knit it. If you can’t see the yarn in person, or have a reference, or just you still don’t have experience to calculate by eye, you can have a look at manufacturer instructions. You can find two options:

• The manufacturer can suggest the knitting needle size to use with the yarn. This can be a reference, but you have to take into account the way you knit. For the same result, I use half or one size bigger than my mother, for example. Sometimes you can also find the gauge. The second label I show you says to you that 7 stitches and 11 rows, with size 9 needles will make a 10x 10 cm square / 4x4 inches square. Some other interesting information is included in the labels, like washing directions.
  

• The manufacturer can give us the weight classification. The Craft Yarn Council of America classify them in lace, superfine, fine, light, medium, bulky, super bulky and jumbo.
  

    The combination of needle size and yarn thickness will determine the tension of the stitch. Depending of the result we want, we can look for a tight stitch, like in a winter sweater; or we can look for a loose stitch, like in a summer garment. In the photo you can see two samples, both with 15 stitches and 20 rows, knitted with seed stitch ( I intend to make tutorials soon for those of you learning to knit). The one on the left has been knitted with 4 mm needles. The one on the right has been knitted with 7 mm needles. This also shows you the importance of knitting a swatch before beginning the work. This way you will know how many stitches you need to cast on to get the desired size. Most of the patterns will tell you the gauge for the yarn used in it. I you substitute the yarn, you can then calculate the stitches you need and not to end up with a garment three sizes too big, or three sizes too small…. once you have finished!!

   If we consider two yarn of different thickness, and we knit with needles giving the same tension, we can also find differences. The thicker the yarn, the faster it is to knit the garment, the thicker the result and the bigger the stitches. This affect the finish, you can see in the designs I knit. The thinner the yarn, the smaller the stitches, the lighter the garment and more time will be needed to finish it. There’s no good or bad choice, it depends of the result we are looking for.

   Regarding to yarn type, we have a great variety of materials:

• Animal origin yarns. Depending of the animal the yarn is obtained from we have wool, alpaca, fleece…This material garments isolate better, so there’s a good choice for warm pieces of clothing. A disadvantage is that you usually have to hand wash them and lay them out to dry not to be deformed. They are usually more expensive yarns, mostly depending on the quality and the origin.

• Vegetable origin yarns. Like cotton or linen. They’re soft and durable, and the result is cool. They are usually used for spring and summer clothes. You can usually machine wash them. They are also quite expensive, depending also on the quality.

• Synthetic yarns. Polyester, acrylic, nylon. (I know a bit about this theme). They are more economic yarns and you can machine wash them. In general, they isolate worse than the animal origin yarns, but in my opinion they’re not for summer clothes, as I have read anywhere.

• Finally we have mixture yarns. They have the advantages (and the disadvantages in case of allergy) of both the types used.

   So depending on what we are looking for (and on our budget), we will choose one type of yarn or another. When I know it, I will tell you the yarn type used in each work, for you to have a better idea of the finish. And mostly for you to know if you have any allergies. Yarns I use are NOT bought at pound shops or dollar stores. I will also try to kame sure they are not made in Chine (sometimes you don’t have the information or the information you have is that of the distributor and not the one of the manufacturer). I don’t mean things made in Chine are not good or poor quality, but you can have more problems because of the dyes used with these yarns.

   If you happen to see a garment made with a yarn type and you would like it with another yarn type (for example it’s made with acrylic and you would like it in wool), please contact me.

   I hope you have now a better idea about the great variety of yarns you can find in the market. Would you want me to go deeply into any of the mentioned aspects?