Knitting Rules! (8 page)
Authors: Stephanie Pearl–McPhee
If your answers are mostly A
: For the love of all things knitted, get to the yarn store. You have nothing.
If your answers are mostly B
: Congratulations. You may enter at the amateur level. You don't need a diet, and can continue to spend freely in the yarn store, but you should consider some new shelving. You're going to need it.
If your answers are mostly C
: You have, despite a substantial stash, no need to control your yarn intake. You should approach
yarn with commonsense moderation and ⦠oh, nuts. You're doomed. It's just a matter of time.
If your answers are mostly D
: I don't want to use the “D” word, but you may want to consider choosing lighter-weight yarns more often, if you know what I mean.
I'm forever finding yarn in the stash that I cannot identify. Despite my best efforts to be an organized and well-informed knitter, either I have weak moments or someone keeps breaking in and messing up my stash. Ball bands go missing (probably because I gave the yarn a test drive, then lost the ball band, rammed the yarn into a plastic bag, and then shoved it back into the stash, naked and unlabeled). Sometimes, though, because I have pangs of remorse and moments of insight, I'm compelled to write what's inside on the outside of the bag. In this case, it's likely that I'll go into the stash, discover a bag that says
wool/acrylic
on the bag and then stand around wondering about the possibilities.
They are:
â¢
The yarn is wool,
but when I wrote on the bag, there was another yarn in with it that was acrylic.
â¢
The yarn is acrylic,
but when I wrote on the bag, there was another yarn in with it that was wool.
â¢
The yarn is a wool/acrylic blend
(of course, I don't remember buying a wool/acrylic blend, but that doesn't mean much. I think I go into a yarn-buying trance under
extreme yarn conditions. I don't remember buying half of the stash. I don't let it bother me).
â¢
The yarn is neither wool, nor acrylic, nor a blend,
but is instead some yarn of a completely unrelated fiber content that got jammed into a leftover bag that I didn't notice had writing on it while I was trying to be a better person who keeps an orderly stash.
Dear Inventor of Ziploc bags
:
On behalf of the knitting community, I would like to take a moment to thank you for your contribution to our art. All over the world, knitters (and spinners) have yarn stashed away in the clear protective prison of a Ziploc bag. In my experience, the miracle of these resealable plastic wonders is multifold.
⢠They keep yarn dust-free. I refuse to discuss what it means that there are so many of us holding yarn for long enough that we need to contemplate layers of dust; I simply thank you.
⢠They keep yarn from unraveling into a tangle that complicates the relationship between knitters and yarn.
⢠They deter the scourge of the planet, the bane of our existence, the very heart of darkness ⦠moths.
⢠They allow us to get more yarn in a closet, as when they're tightly packed, these plastic pouches make good, if slippery, bricks with which to build yarn walls.
I know you're probably unaware that this is a gift you have given us knitters, and I realize this use may be a surprise to you, in that you really seem to believe (if your advertising is any indication) that people are buying them to store food. Take it from me and the other 49,999,999 knitters in North America. Nobody has that much food. It's knitters.
Thankfully
,
Stephanie
(
Who would appreciate it if you would make a Ziploc bag big enough to hold a sweater's worth of wool, and solve the problem of the knitting needles poking holes in the plastic.
)
Naturally, because I am me, all attempts to organize my life or have a labeled stash and keep things in an orderly fashion are doomed to result in chaos and confusion, basically the opposite effect of what I was aiming for. In fact, instead of being a knitter who has this stash of power that makes sense and is accessible and inspiring, it turns out that I'm actually a knitter who inexplicably removes the ball bands from yarn and then jams the skeins into an enormous stash of other yarn that is remarkably similar, none of which I remember buying.
It's worth noting that every single knitter who has ever wondered about the fiber content, yardage, or weight of a bandless ball thought, at the time that he put the ball into the stash, that he would remember what it was when he came across it again. Trust me. You won't.
In my defense (and clearly, I need defending, since I can't count the number of times I've found mystery yarn in the stash, with the label long abandoned or lost), I'm also a big thrift-store and sale-bin yarn buyer, and while that's frugal and admirable, it also breeds any number of bandless balls. I'm also a spinner with a lot of spinning friends, and gracious gifts of hand-spun don't come with labels.
There's stuff I need to know about my mystery yarn before I can knit it, and some simple yarn interrogation can tell a lot. Using a system of tests, measures, and cleverness, you can usually figure out pretty much what you have, even if you've lost the ball band.
Things can get a little odd for a yarn detective, so you might want to do some of your sleuthing while you're alone. Many valid yarn investigation methods might lead your nearest and dearest to believe you're a couple of skeins short of a sweater (if you know what I mean).
There are three things you need to know about your suspect: what it's made of, what weight it is, and (heaven help you) how much there is. The most reliable way of figuring out what your yarn is made of is
the burn test.
This highly scientific way to torch your stash can tell you a lot about what you've got.
Warning:
I feel bad even mentioning this, because I know you're really smart, but I feel compelled to mention the obvious hazards of executing the burn test. First of all, have some water nearby. You never know what will burn, or how well. Second, conduct the burn test over a metal sink, not plastic. I'm not apologizing for what will happen if you drop a flaming piece of cotton into a meltable sink. Finally, I (as a woman who has set fire to far bigger chunks of the stash than she planned) suggest you burn small pieces of yarn and hold the pieces with tweezers or metal tongs (again, not plastic). Fire can travel faster than you think.
Ready? Get a piece of yarn, set a match to it, and watch closely.
Even after you have set fire to things, it may not be so simple to tell the differences between them
.
Let's take a closer look:
⢠Cotton and linen burn similarly, but linen fibers are much longer than those of cotton. Pull out a few of the individual fibers and examine them. Are they long or short?
⢠Man-made fibers shrink from the flame; all-natural fibers do not.
⢠Rayon, because it's made from wood pulp, acts more like a natural fiber than a man-made one. It won't melt, but it will burn.
Wool
Shrinks from the flame:
No
Smells like:
Burning hair or feathers
The flame:
A small orange flame, difficult to keep burning; may simply smolder instead of burn
Ignition:
Doesn't ignite quickly and the flame goes out if wool is removed from the fire
What's left behind:
A gummy ash forms along the burning edge of the wool, but when it's completely burned it leaves a crumbly ash
Shrinks from the flame:
No
Smells like:
Burning paper
The flame:
Large and steady yellow or amber flame
Ignition:
Lights right away and will have a glowing ember that travels after the flame is blown out
What's left behind:
Small amount of soft gray ash
Shrinks from the flame:
No
Smells like:
Burning grass
The flame:
Large and steady
Ignition:
Slower than cotton
What's left behind:
Soft gray ash
Shrinks from the flame:
No
Smells like:
Burning hair
The flame:
Tiny flame
Ignition:
Burns slowly but is harder to put out than cotton or linen
What's left behind:
A black shiny ash that crumbles
Shrinks from the flame:
Yes
Smells like:
Acrid or harsh odor
The flame:
A white-orange flame that burns quickly
Ignition:
Catches easily, will burn until extinguished
What's left behind:
Hard ash
Shrinks from the flame:
Yes
Smells like:
Burning plastic
The flame:
Flame has a blue base and orange tip
Ignition:
Melts, then burns
What's left behind:
Hard ash
Shrinks from the flame:
Yes
Smells like:
Burning leaves
The flame:
Orange
Ignition:
Lights and burns rapidly
What's left behind:
Very little ash
If the burn test hasn't helped you enough, try the bleach test. Put a small piece of the yarn in question in a dish of chlorine bleach, the kind you use for the laundry. Cotton and acrylic will stay put (though cotton will bleach white or yellow) but wool, silk, and other animal proteins (cashmere and alpaca, for example) will dissolve entirely in the bleach.
The bleach test and its effect on wool are important to remember the next time you want to get a blueberry stain off a really nice wool sweater that took you four months to knit.
Wool (including mohair, alpaca, angora, and llama) felts, shrinks, and sticks to itself when you expose it to water, heat, and agitation. Silk, quiviut, and man-made fibers, on the other hand, do not. Take a length of the suspect yarn, squish it into a ball between your fingers, and then immerse it in hot soapy water. Squish, roll, and smoosh the yarn roughly for five minutes, then take it out and have a look. Try to pull apart your little ball. Is the yarn sticking to itself? Has it shrunk a little or begun to cling into a ball shape? If so, you probably have wool. If the yarn is still yarn, showing absolutely no inclination to stick to itself, you likely have acrylic, cotton, silk, a man-made fiber of another sort, or a superwash wool.
Superwash wool is wool that has been specially treated so that it will not felt, full, or shrink. If the suspect fiber seemed like wool when you burned or bleached it but it has now failed the felting test, consider the possibility
that it is superwash. You may also consider the possibility that this whole thing is going to drive you nuts and then bury the skein in the backyard under a tree. We all understand.
If, after burning, sniffing, bleaching, and guessing you still aren't sure what you have, go back to the stash and find something similar to what you think you have. If you think it's wool, put a wool yarn through the tests and see if it behaves like the suspect.
There is no test I know of (short of getting a microscope and an education in these matters) that will help you distinguish among different animal fibers. You can guess, by characteristics like elasticity and drape, but being able to reliably tell the difference between alpaca and llama is going to remain a challenge.