Thursday, November 17, 2011

A gap in my yarn knowledge

I have been so excited to start my Opposite Pole sweater by Joji Locatelli. I've had the pattern picked out for awhile and even had my bag of purple Malabrigo yarn waiting to be swatched. I balled up about half of the skeins and started the swatch. I quickly realized that the yarn I had, was too thin of a gauge for the pattern. No problem I thought, just need to do a little research, because I'm positive the pattern called for Malabrigo, and I'm positive I have a bag of Malabrigo. I've finally gotten a chance to sit down and look at the yarn and Ravelry together and have figured out what's wrong.

I have Malabrigo "Silky Merino" which is a dk weight and the pattern calls for Malabrigo "Merino Worsted" which is a heavy worsted yarn. That shows me I have a huge gap in my knowledge of Malabrigo yarns which must be corrected immediately, by using more Malabrigo.

I'll be heading down to my LYS tomorrow to see what can be done about my education.

I think I have another idea for the Silky Merino yarn already. A long time ago I bought a couple of patterns from Stitch Diva and one of them was a sweater called Labyrinth by Wendy Bernard. I had also bought the Giselle pattern at the same time and had made that one first. I didn't really like the format of the patterns because the font size is too small and everything is squished together on a few pages. They are really hard to read and I won't be buying anymore patterns from that website because of the response I received when I requested that the patterns be more legible. The extra cost of a page was too much to consider even if the pattern was difficult to read (which is absolutely ridiculous if you ask me, we're talking 1 or 2 pages here in a downloaded pdf file). I felt that they didn't care about the quality of their patterns and that they are not very customer service oriented, so I would not be buying anything from that website again. So the patterns I bought - Giselle, Labyrinth, and the Simple Knitted Bodice were put away in favor of patterns I could actually read without a magnifying glass. I had left the projects in my queue and when I was looking for what I could do with my Silky Merino, Labyrinth popped up. It really is a beautiful sweater and I still would like to knit it. I guess I'll just have to suffer through the poor formatting of the pattern and see if I can get a cool sweater out of it.

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