Estimating yarn quantities
My first official Sand & Sea meeting was fun and informative. I had met some of the people in this knitting guild last month, when I attended the Bohus workshop with Susanna Hansson, but yesterday was my first time attending one of the regular monthly meetings. Same friendly, relaxed atmosphere I enjoyed at the workshop, including carpooling with some new and old friends. So friendly, in fact, that Pamela brings one of her Bearded Collies, a very handsome puppy called Ghillea. Is he cute or what? No, he doesn't sit on her lap all the time! He was amazingly well behaved and never even made a sound or moved while we were having demos and show-and-tell.
One of the things I learned yesterday is a useful tip for planning yarn purchases. When estimating yardage for a project, keep in mind that yarn is sold by weight and yardage quantity is usually approximate. Dark colors weigh more than light ones because of the weight of the dye, so when buying the same yarn in different colors, you may need to buy a little extra of the dark color. Thanks Aila for this tip! Aila took the Domino Knitting workshop with Susanna Hansson last month (I missed that one) and found out this the hard way. The project for that workshop was a domino scarf in three colors and she chose the "DNA" variation, where two of the colors cover exactly the same area so she purchased a ball of each color. Because of the different weight, she ran out of the dark yarn before the scarf was completed. Fortunately, someone else had enough of that color available that she could finish the scarf.
For those of you who knit Fair Isle, this might be the reason for the problems you occasionally run into when buying Fair Isle kits where you run out of some colors sooner than you expect. Marina, I'd be interested in hearing from you since you had this problem twice in the past few months. Was it the darker colors you ran out of?
This reminded me of another instance where the same yarn behaves differently depending on the color: felting. I knitted and felted a bag last year and used three colors of the same alpaca bouclè yarn — black, dark gray and light gray — and they felted to different degrees. I think the dye had something to do with that, too, but I'm not sure. Maybe Janel can shed some light on this issue, since she has a chemistry background and is an experience dyer. By the way, congratulations Janel on making the cover of Spin Off magazine!
Comments
Very useful tip! Thanks for sharing.
And that dog is just like an enormous hairball of a baby! Very cute!
Posted by: Agnes | June 10, 2007 12:38 PM
That's interesting what you wrote about light and dark colours. Honestly, I can't say because I'm not doing patterns where you need an equal amount of light & dark. Also, I'm guestimating what I need since the patterns were written for 28g balls, not the 25g that are being sold today. And we're not even going to mention the specific company which doesn't tell you how much yarn you need and how much they give you ;-)
One thing I've noticed about light and dark yarns and this pertains to both Jamieson & Smith and Jamieson, dark yarns seem thinner.
Posted by: Marina | June 10, 2007 1:44 PM
Love that dog!!! What a sweetie! Anymore pictures of him?
Thanks for the tips! Who would've thought that darker colors are heavier! My trivia bit for the day!
Posted by: Kate/Massachusetts | June 10, 2007 4:15 PM
Are you sure the different Alpaca colors were dyed? Black, dark and light gray sound like they might be natural colors and the difference in felting might have to do with the yarn coming from different animals with different fiber properties rather than dye.
A more saturated color might affect felting because it might stick so strongly to the scales that it would prevent them from waving around as much as a less saturated color. Perhaps I will do an experiment to see if this is true. I would expect, if this theory were true, that darker colors would felt less than lighter colors.
When I took a workshop with Sharon Costello and we did wet felting, she said that excess unbonded dye prevented efficient felting, so we rinsed saturated colors well until they did not bleed any more. However we didn't really do a controlled experiment to see if this was truly causing less felting.
As far as dye causing dark colors of commercial yarn to weigh more and therefore have less yardage, I'd like to do a test on that as well. I think yardage actually varies quite a bit on commercial balls so the evidence might be anecdotal but I'll test that one out as well.
Posted by: janel | June 10, 2007 7:42 PM
Janel, good point about the alpaca. It was a blend that contained also some synthetic (yes, a poor choice for felting, but it did work out in the end) and I don't know for sure if it was dyed. I'll be very interested in hearing about your tests, if you find the time to run them.
Posted by: Francesca | June 10, 2007 8:05 PM
I never knew any of this - thanks for telling us!
(By the way, Yo-Yo Ma's bow must need re-stringing given the amount of time he's been playing for me all weekend - thankyou so much for that tip!)
Posted by: Karen | June 11, 2007 5:42 AM
What a sweetie...that's a puppy?! Must be all the beard. Even MFB got a good giggle out of that picture.
Portugal sounds like a wonderful trip. Thanks for all this food for thought on weight and colors.
How's the foot? I have another "Ouch" and am using a cane for a couple of weeks. Figures, eh?
Posted by: Barbp | June 11, 2007 6:03 PM
Thanks for the info... I would be really interested to hear the results from Janel as well.
Though one other consideration for lighter colours if they were synthetically dyed is how much treatment was done to obtain a base lighter colour. Since the reason that white felts so poorly is all the treatment that has been done to achieve the white colour.
I did do some test just now with using a yarn balance and a kitchen scale. Since I was really curious. I tested 4 different colours of the same yarn and didn't see any difference in the weight for the darker colours using the kitchen scale. For the yarn, balance they showed the exact same length for the yarns (white, black, brown, pink) http://carolinahomespun.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=CH&Product_Code=MCMB&Category_Code=Y
Definately something to do some more investigations on. Mine was just a super fast test and only one brand.
Posted by: kitty kitty | June 14, 2007 8:55 AM
Kitty Kitty,
Thanks for the information. I really hope that we can hear from more knitters and see if what I heard is in fact accurate or anecdotal or maybe due to the convergence of several factors. There may be variables involved that affect the yarn weight/yardage ratio beyond the weight of the dye.
Posted by: Francesca | June 14, 2007 10:05 AM