Thursday, February 3, 2011

Knitting Up Rhinebeck 2008: Silk Bubbles

Silk Bubbles Yarn

I have a thing for novelty yarns, even if I seldom make anything from them. I have a whole basket of fantastically colored or amazingly textured yarns that are mostly for inspiration. Some of them will eventually become mini-scarves, or trim on a sweater collar & cuffs, but others well I dunno. They are For Pretty. For petting. For gazing at. Each luscious skein called to me in the yarn store, and I heeded the call.

I really tried to buy "project" yarns at Rhinebeck, not petting/gazing yarns, if only because their cost was high compared to most LYS impulse purchases. Then I found this stuff.

A Touch of Twist had mostly sort of plain yarns, at pretty low prices. I got a sweater's worth of black alpaca, and also a nice wool blend in lace weight for a shawl. Then I fell for Silk Bubbles.

Slinky nubby multicolored silk yarn, that cheap? That pretty? That...fingering weight?

After my usual long delay I wound the skeins and made a swatch. It was...limp. What was I going to do with it? I figured, scarf! Which is my default item I guess. The stuff was too thin for a hat, not stretchy enough for anything else. So I cast on and started knitting.

I remembered why I have only ever liked knitting wool boucle. (Don't get me started on Lion Brand Boucle, which is the NASTIEST stuff I ever tried to crochet. Only slightly friendlier as a knit fabric. Ugh!) Wool boucle (like my favorite black cardigan) is bouncy and stretchy, and even though you inevitably keep sticking your needles into the loops of fiber instead of the loops of yarn, it's easy to recover and keep going. Not so silk boucle. Oh no indeed. It was like knitting with linen or mercerized cotton, only without any give whatsoever, and half-blinded by nubbins. It was slow. It was frustrating. It felt lovely in my hands, but it took ages and ages to do a row.

I got as far as shown in the picture, and I stopped. After 4 inches of teensy tiny stitches I called it quits. I tossed it in the Hibernation Pile and forgot about it.

Now...well, I'm trying to record all my Rhinebeck mania, so I found it and I'll give it another go. Doubling the yarn might help, and there should be enough for a small Moebius scarf like the one I made from the Maple Creek silk blend. I'll give it a try this weekend. We'll see.

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