Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Stretchy Yarn: A Success Story

I'm excited to report I've made progress with my wonky aqua yarn I wrote about in the last post! You may remember that I began using GGH Samoa yarn with the intention of making a vintage-looking trivet for my kitchen. The yarn is a 50% acrylic/50% cotton blend that felt really great in my hands and called my name through its pretty aquamarine colorway. Despite all of my positive mojo with this yarn in the beginning, it has been very challenging for me to work with.

Considering I'm an impatient crocheter the difficulty of working with this yarn is not making me to want to use it again in the future.

What's making it difficult? There is a definite stretch factor that I just don't know how to compensate well enough for. The stitches that I began making included clusters (in the trivet), then later bobbles (in my first dishcloth attempt), and those types of stitches seem to be pulling the yarn differently than when I make the surrounding chains and single crochets.

My first thought after three failed trivet attempts was to donate the yarn all together. I changed my mind and decided to give it one more try by ditching the beautiful trivet pattern and going to basic stitches to make a dishcloth. I used a single crochet stitch for the body of the dishcloth then picked an edging to add for decoration and contrast. I pulled out my handy dandy stitch dictionary for edging inspiration and began my foundation row in yellow.

I realized that the edging pattern didn't quite match up mathematically with the stitch count on my single crochet square. As I mentioned, I'm impatient and this project had already begun to drive me a bit insane, so I just wanted to power through and see what the outcome would be.

As you can see my scalloped edging is not perfect in the corners and could use further work. I have three more single crochet squares that need edging added, so I'm going to pull another book with a stitch dictionary from my library and see what edging patterns may already have the correct stitch count for what I need. If I can't find a perfect fit, then I will experiment a bit more so that I can create a more shapely cloth.

What are you working on this week and how is your project coming along?