The Problem of Handspun

September 29th, 2007

Rarely do I take a long time agonizing over what to do for a particular project. Either I’m following a pattern, or I’m going off some inspiration from a picture I’ve seen or yarn I have. However, when the handknit is to be made for someone else and the yarn comes from my very own handspun in a limited quantity, I’m faced with a few difficulties. The first difficulty is one that I come up against quite often with handspun yarn. There just isn’t enough. I’ve come to the conclusion that 8oz is the absolute minimum I should spin of a particular yarn to at least have enough for a scarf. In this instance I have 4oz.

The problems of yarn shortage can very easily be solved by hopefully searching through the stash, and if you’re lucky you may just have something with exactly the right thickness, and exactly the right color. I was so lucky, and was excited to find that my gauge in both the handspun and commercial yarn were exact to a T. I could stripe the ends of the scarf with the commercial and handspun to stretch the handspun as much as possible.

The second difficulty was the one that took me the longest to work out. What exactly to **do** with the yarn; what stitch pattern should I use? I wanted to do something that would do justice to the sheen and stitch definition of this yarn. I also wanted something reversible that didn’t take up too much yarn per inch (so no tubes) due to the yarn limitations. The problem was that most of my ideas that would show this yarn off to its best involved some amount of stockinette stitch, which is certainly **not** reversible. I waffled between stockinette with garter borders, a basketweave knit/purl pattern, some lace (also generally not reversible), and a chevron pattern. This took at least an hour if not more, and my final decision (after long deliberation and picturing in my mind) once I’d finished swatching and trying to imagine what each idea would look like, and flipping through the stitch dictionary, going back to my original ideas again after returning to the later ideas again was…the chevron. It would do justice to the striping of the two colors, as well as my handspun yarn (again, not reversible).

So I didn’t like it, ripped it out, and knit up what you see here. After all that freakin’ time agonizing over exactly what kind of scarf I wanted to knit, I end up with garter stitch, garter stitch, garter stitch. I love it! Both yarns are incredibly soft, the colors will suit my mom wonderfully (remember, she chose the purple), and you can see they are a gauge perfect match. Even the reverse side looks kind of cool and different in its own way.

Once that madness of yarn ends is woven in, non-knitters won’t even be able to tell which is supposed to be the front and which the back. I’m considering knitting both ends at the same time, so that I can make sure that I use half of the brown alpaca for each end. I didn’t have a single skein so I couldn’t easily split it in half. I’m so pleased with how this is coming, and it’s nice to have a super-simple project on the needles again. I am definitely not one to shy away from some good ole garter stitch.

I’m finding more and more, as I try to find things to knit with my handspun, a difficulty in trying to fit my project to the yarn rather than vice versa. I have recently finished the two very small skeins of lace weight yarn (remember the white mohair and angora?) and have not a clue what to make out of them. Perhaps some wristlets? How the heck do other spinners deal with the limitations of knitting one-of-a-kind handspun yarn, only buy their fiber in large quantities?

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 6:54 pm and is filed under Knitting, Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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