Skip to main content

Found Yarn

Yarn comes to me in different ways.  Most of it is bought by me, but some comes to me from family and friends.  So it was that this ball of yarn came to me on Friday night.


Jami and John invited us to their home on Friday evening for a Southwestern feast.  Good Mexican food is not easily found in Vancouver so we were excited to see what Jami had prepared.  It was a wonderfully flavoured red mole with chicken.  It was full of nutty goodness and the best part was we brought some home and have enjoyed a couple of meals of leftovers. BTW she also made a killer chocolate pudding with avocado.  Yum, yum and yum.

But back to the yarn. Jami said she had been attending a workshop and as she was leaving the multi-coloured ball of yarn shown above was just hanging out all by itself. She looked around to see if its owner could be found, the owner wasn't found so she decided to take it home.  She does know a knitter, and now I'm the lucky recipient.  It came to me just as you see it above without its label and perhaps with some of the yarn used for another project.

So here it is this found yarn in lovely earthy tones calling out to be used.  At my place on Saturday I became some sort of yarn detective. Aside from smelling like the red mole, it also smelled like real wool; it also feels like wool. That determination has been verified because it has plant foreign material in it like real wool as well. It is worsted wool, this I know because of my fumblings and bumblings with wool. It is too thick for sock or DK and too thin for bulky weight wool. Then it was weighed and found to be 59 grams or approximately 120 yards of wool. (There was a certain amount of looking at several websites and speculation to come up with this number.)  That is not a lot of yarn, the average baby sweater in newborn size takes about 300 yards.

So I know it is
* wool
* worsted weight
* about 120 yards

What does one make with so little yarn? A short scarf? one sock? both are possible, but instead I fixated on knitting another toque/hat. And after some time checking out other websites, this is what I decided upon Barley from Tin Can Knits. It's an easy, no frills toque that suits this yarn to a tee. Here's their version of Barley:





And here's mine so far.





I am knitting as fast as I can to see if I actually calculated the yardage properly.  Everyone, keep your fingers crossed I have a sense it will be very close.  But then remembering I am me, I do also have a Plan B should it be necessary.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anatomy of a Sock

I've been knitting socks for a relatively short time.  One of the disconcerting things for me as I started following patterns for socks is the pattern designer assumes the knitter (in this case that would be me) knows all the parts of a sock.  So I thought I'd devote a post to improve my own knowledge about the anatomy of a sock and maybe some of you will learn something about the humble yet necessary sock as well. Here's the names of the parts of the foot as I know them. #49 ankle, #50 heel, #51, instep, #52 ball, #53 big toe, #54 toe, #55 little toe, #56 toenail. There are some parts more important for this discussion; first the heel of a foot is generally used to refer to the entire C-shape from the ankle to the instep.  Speaking of the instep, it refers to that curve near the bottom of the foot.  And what seems to be missing in the design above is the sole which generally refers to the bottom of the foot in total or plantar aspect in more technical terms...
10 comments
Read more

Gosling's Meme and Knitting

What is a meme, you may first ask? Well Dr. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, came up with the idea in the late 1970's and stated something like: a meme is to a society what a gene is to a human. Both are an element or unit that can be replicated or passed from one individual to another. During the Internet age memes can be easily shared, replicated or otherwise passed on to another. Recent examples can be found on Gawker . Memes can include piano playing cats, a honey badger, the Call Me Maybe phenomenon and so on. The political campaign in the U.S. helped fuel memes using some of the most unusual statements like, "binders of women" and "you didn't build that." A few memes have staying power but most have a relatively short life span. Gosling's meme related to knitting has been around for some time; so when I again saw another post about him recently, it was time to figure out the origin. Ryan Gosling is a Canadian actor born in Onta...
Post a Comment
Read more

Yarn Usage II: Crochet vs. Knit

All four swatches were made.  Each is 6.25" or 15.875 cm square; each prepared with the same sized yarn and needles or hook.  It took 25 stitches to get the appropriate width for the knit swatches and only 20 stitches for both of the crocheted squares.  That already says something, but I'll get to it in a minute.  (Don't know what I'm talking about here?  Check out this post first.) Unfortunately, you'll just have to trust me that four swatches were prepared and that they were all the same size.  In the excitement to get to measuring and weighing of the swatches, no photographic evidence was taken.  Luckily for me the results of this research doesn't have to be reviewed by a jury of my peer.  This blog post will be the sum and total of where this information is published. The remains of my four swatches What can be shared, however, are the balls of yarn rewound after the weighing and measuring was completed.  You will note the size ...
9 comments
Read more