Annoying Yarn

[firstfrost]

So, I've been working on the biannual sweater for mjperson. It's a silk/mohair/wool blend, part Noro Kureyon (multicolor) and part blue. I think it'll be nice.

Anyhow, I miscalculated slightly and ended up needing to get one more skein of Noro Kureyon, and the only one left at Woolcott was awful! Okay, it's always been slubby and I don't personally like slubs, but this skein isn't just slubby, it's... stringy? There's these little tangly pieces of something more like thread, and the whole skein is infested with them. I spend 70% of the time pulling out the threads and only 30% knitting. Bah. If they had all been like this, I wouldn't have bought the yarn to start with.



It's not quite as horribly ugly in the knitted fabric as it is in the yarn:

Earlier (good) yarn	Later (bad) yarn

Comments

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Maybe you could try another yarn store -- Wild & Wooly in Lexington and Knittin' Kitten on the Cambridge/Belmont border come to mind.

Personally, once Woolcotts changed ownership and they started focusing more on fancy frilly yarns I stopped going there. Its only advantage in my mind is that it's readily T-accessible.

It looks like a pretty yarn, though!

[twe.livejournal.com]

Oh, I saw you picking them off the other day, and that seemed like so much work. I'm glad to hear the whole sweater wasn't like that.

Frilly yarn

[twe.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've never been a fan of frilly yarns. They can be very pretty on the skein, but somehow a hairy sweater isn't any fun to wear, especially when it's dry and staticky.

[mijven.livejournal.com]

Thanks for labeling the pictures - apparently you've done such a good job thrashing your yarn that I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference based on sight!

Re: Frilly yarn

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I'd mostly only make a scarf with a foofy yarn, but I got distracted by socks rather than scarves as my Short Project of Choice. :)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

It's (I think) more evident in the real sleeve than in the picture, but then, I tend to notice things more obsessively (like dye lot mismatches) in things that I'm working on. :) But at least most of the egregiously huge strings got taken out.

(Mike kept looking at me funny as I would spit-splice the yarn back into a semblance of yarnlike after removing some of the more pesky strings. I can just see him thinking "ewww. I have to make sure I clean this sweater before wearing it.")

[twe.livejournal.com]

The good yarn knitting looks a little move even to me, but it's near enough that I could accept that the difference is just in my head.

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Something in how you displayed these pictures eats my LJ page.

I can see the pictures no problem. But the mood, music, and comments line end up at the top of my page. Above other people's posts.

You have powerful mojo.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

Oops, is it better now?

[visage.livejournal.com]

Yup, it's better now.

[greyautumnrain.livejournal.com]

At least the Wolcott help seems nicer than it was. I never will forget one of my first experiences with them (circa 1990) when I made the mistake of letting slip that the wool I was buying was for a crochet project, and I got rather archly told that they did have a beginner's knitting class on such-and-such a night. Sigh. I was wearing a hand-knit sweater at the time.

Of course they really lost my business when they quit carrying Lamb's Pride.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I am also sad that they don't carry Lamb's Pride any more, though I've found some very nice basic wools there since (the pink Torso Sock was made from Gems, which I really liked, though I haven't seen it there more recently).

I do have a theory, though, that Lamb's Pride was difficult for a while - after Woolcott stopped carrying it, I tried to order some from Patternworks, and it came in dribs and drabs because they were very back ordered. So with two data points, I speculate that it was a supply problem rather than a store problem. But that was years ago and probably not relevant now one way or the other.