Clara Parkes - The knitters book of yarn: the ultimate guide tochoosing, using, and enjoying yarn

Copyright 2007 by Clara Parkes
Photography and Illustrations copyright 2007 by
Potter Craft

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Potter Craft,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.pottercraft.com

POTTER CRAFT and colophon, and POTTER
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parkes, Clara.
The knitters book of yarn : the ultimate guide to
choosing, using, and enjoying yarn / by Clara
Parkes. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
eISBN: 978-0-307-58698-8
1. Knitting.2. Yarn.I. Title.
TT820.P282007
677.028245dc22 2007009363

Graphic design by Goodesign
Photography by Alexandra Grablewski
Illustrations by Kate McKeon
Cover photograph by Alexandra Grablewski

Thanks to the Craft Yarn Council of America
(www.yarnstandards.com) for their Standard Yarn
Weight System Chart.

v3.1

A LL KNITTERLY CREATION STEMS FROM ONE SIMPLE ELEMENT: YARN. IT IS THE BAKERS FLOUR, THE JEWELERS GOLD, THE GARDENERS SOIL. YARN IS CREATION, CONSOLATION, AND CHAOS ALL SPUN TOGETHER INTO ONE PERFECT BALL. ITS A SIMPLE CONCEPT, TWISTING FIBERS TOGETHER INTO A CONTINUOUS THREAD OF YARN. BUT THE VARIETY OF FIBERS, BLENDS, AND SPINS IS TRULY INFINITE. SO IS OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YARN. WE LOVE IT, WE COVET IT, WE ARE KNOCKED SENSELESS BY IT, YET SOMETIMES WE ARE BAFFLED, THWARTED, AND BETRAYED BY IT.

Few materials undergo so many transformations during their lifetime. From the plant or animal where it originates, it gets clipped and fluffed and dipped and blended and twisted and dyed, displayed as a skein in your local yarn shop (LYS), wound into a ball and worked into just the right garment, washed and blocked, and finally worn.

With so many steps and choices along the way, its inevitable that one or two things will go wrong. Im not talking about the dropped stitches and funky decreases. Im talking about the bigger mistakes we usually dont discover until its too late: The socks that grow twice as long in the first wash, the cardigan that droops and sways like a church bell when you wear it, the gorgeous scarf that feels like sandpaper against your delicate neck.

These are what I call yarn-related errors. Sometimes theyre caused by eager yarn manufacturers who need to sell more of a yarn, even if it isnt entirely right for the pattern. But more often they stem from a deeper knitterly dilemma we all face at one point or another: matching the right yarn to the right project.

In an ideal world, wed fall in love with a yarn, find the perfect pattern that calls for this yarn, and knit our way into the sunset. Or wed fall in love with a pattern and the yarn it calls for, both of which would be easily available, and wed all live happily ever after.

Sadly, this is rarely how it works. We fall in love with a yarn and simply must have it, giving little thought to what it will become. We collect patterns, books, and magazines for projects we may never complete. And we struggle to bring the two together.

Some yarns have little if any pattern support from their manufacturerespecially the smaller-scale farms and hand-dyers. But even when the company does provide patterns for its yarns, sometimes we just dont like them. Perhaps we like the aesthetics of a designer who works with one yarn company but we love the yarns of another. Maybe we need to find lower-cost yarn alternatives. Or were seeking patterns for a yarn in our stash that has long since been discontinued, or trying to find yarn for a pattern written ages ago for a yarn long gone.

Discontinued yarns are one of the biggest headaches for knitters. By the time this book reaches you, chances are that several of the yarns mentioned in these pages will no longer be available. No matter how hard we try, well never be able to escape this reality. We must learn to work around it.

And thats why this book exists. I believe each of us has the potential to be a yarn whisperer, to hold a skein in our hands, look at it, touch it, listen to it, even smell it, and instinctively know what the yarn wants to become. With this innate understanding, wed never need to rely on a specific pattern again.

Some of us are relatively new to knitting and approach impromptu pairings with anxiety and uncertainty. Others, having gone it alone for years, have developed their own instinctyet they still may have occasional doubts.

I want to give a formal vocabulary to that instinct and help you refine it further.

While Ive assembled a vast selection of yarns in these pages, it is by no means intended as a compendium of every yarn available. Considering the frequency with which yarns enter and leave the market today, such an effort would be futile.

Instead, the yarns in this book serve as examples of the most common fiber types, preparations, spins, and ply combinations that youll likely find in your local yarn shop and unearth in your stash. They come from large-scale manufacturers and importers, medium-sized companies, boutique dye shops, community spinneries, and old-fashioned sheep farms. Some are ironclad standards, while others are smaller, magical blends from noteworthy people whose story I felt needed to be told.

Because the best way to learn is by doing, within each chapter in youll find several patterns designed expressly for that yarns specific spin, ply, and/or fiber type. Youre not only reading about yarn, but you get to pull out a skein, cast on, and feel its precise design potential for yourself.

The patterns come to us from some of the most inquisitive design minds in the knitting worldpeople I admire not only for their work but for their instinctive love and understanding of yarn. They also share insight about what, in those yarns, led them to design what they did.

By the time we reach the end of our journey, you will have a much better understanding of yarn, how its made, who makes it, how it gets to you, and what it longs to become in your hands. The next time you pick up a skein and someone asks, What are you going to do with it?, youll be able to respond with inspired confidence.