Yarn Review: Rowan Bamboo Tape

Once again, thanks to Amy and Sheryl at Yarntopia, I have a chance to knit with some delicious new yarn: Rowan’s Bamboo Tape. As you can probably guess by its name, the yarn is made from bamboo and it’s a tape yarn. (Yes, Valerie, it really is a tape yarn!)

Bamboo Tape is delightfully soft to the touch. It’s very smooth and silky. In fact, it has a slight sheen to it that is somewhat similar to the sheen of silk. But not exactly like silk, just similar. I was actually surprised by the extreme softness of the yarn. I’ve never worked with bamboo before and I guess I expected it to be somewhat similar to cotton. But Bamboo Tape is not similar to cotton at all.

The yarn is a tube of woven threads that is pressed flat. This construction give the yarn a bit of resiliency and springness that is usually absent from yarns made from plant fibers. As a result, the yarn is easy to work with. People who complain about working with “stiff” cotton yarns will not have an issue with this yarn. The construction of the yarn also prevents splitting. I occasionally catch the yarn with my needle tip and the needle just stops. The needle doesn’t go through the yarn and doesn’t distort the yarn very much.

The resiliency of the yarn is evident in the knitting fabric as well. The fabric feels squishy and is stretchy. It has a fairly nice drape—somewhere between the drape of silk and the drape of wool. I think the yarn will be wonderful for summer knitting. But be very careful when you are swatching with this yarn. I promise you that the yarn will grow when wet. And then it will grow even MORE when it dries completely. So wash and thoroughly dry your swatch before measuring!

At this point, I’m not sure how the fabric will wear. I’m not ready to abuse my swatch because I’m not sure if I will need to unravel it to finish my sweater.

Now that I’ve sung the praises of this yarn, I have to admit that there is a down side. This yarn is heavy! Not thick-heavy, but weight-heavy. Even before I finished knitting the back of my sweater I was surprised at the weight of the fabric on the needles. But I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised. A 50 g ball of Bamboo Tape contains a mere 82 yards of yarn. Even the smallest size of the sweater that I am making requires 9 balls of Bamboo Tape! And the pattern is a simple a short-sleeved “T-shirt” (it’s Tori shown on this page). At about $10 per ball, even a small garment will be pricey.

Yarn stats:
Rowan Bamboo Tape
100% bamboo
Approximately 4.75 sts/in. (worsted weight)
50 g balls (82 yds/75 m)
And despite what the misprinted label says, it should be knit on about a US size 8 needle

Yarn Review: RYC Silk Wool DK

Judging by the number of comments on the last post, the results of my personality test apparently did scare some people away. I will try to be more agreeable and less neurotic from now on.

But this is a yarn review! Here it is, without further ado.

Silk Wool DK is a new fall yarn from RYC. It is 50% spun silk, 50% merino wool, and 100% luxury. From the moment that Amy showed me the little bits of yarn on the color card, I knew that I wanted to knit with this yarn.

What first attracted me to the yarn was the sheen of the silk. This sheen is so intense that the yarn appears to be glowing from a light within, a quality that is difficult to photograph. The appeal of the yarn is furthered by the extreme softness of the yarn. I can easily imagine this yarn being used in a slinky, skin-tight sweater for a special evening out.

The yarn is a tightly-spun, 4-ply yarn that has a springy, bouncy feel that initially reminded me of Karabella Aurora 8. In fact, Silk Wool knits up into a fabric that behaves and feels similar to the fabric knit from Aurora 8. Thanks to the wool content, ribbing is very grabby and cables pop nicely. However, the yarn also has a nice crunch to it due to the high percentage of silk. RYC has done a masterful job blending these two fibers such that the superior qualities of each are well represented.

The yarn texture is generally smooth, though the yarn does bloom a little with washing and friction. Thankfully, the sheen of the silk is not muted by the slight surface fuzz. Silk Wool is easy to work with and is not prone to splitting, but I have snagged a few stitches as I knit. When snagged, the silk fibers tend to pull out and create a fuzzy poof in the fabric that cannot be easily worked back into the fabric. So if you have rough skin on your hands like I do, be sure to keep your hands well moisturized when working with this yarn!

I am thoroughly enjoying my experience with Silk Wool. It has already gained a place in my “favorite yarns” list. If money were no object, I could think of many sweaters that I would want to knit with it.

Silk Wool comes in 50 g balls (100 m or 109 yds) and has a recommended gauge of 22 stitches and 30 rows in 4 inches. It is currently available in ten muted colors, which include pastels and rich, dark colors. I am working with “Velvet” color #307. The RYC Classic Style book contains 16 patterns using Silk Wool. The patterns include several pullovers and cardigans, two vest, three bags, and a scarf.

A Fallen Woman

A public service announcement:
Thank you everyone for your compliments on the Cap-Sleeved Top and thank you for not completely shunning me after I made my dreadful confession. I promise not to slack off too much. I will keep my left-slanting and right-slanting increases and decreases in order and I will continue to bend over my blocking board until my back aches just to insure that each piece matches the schematic down to an 1/8th of an inch.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging:

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee may have been the first to call herself the Yarn Harlot, but she isn't the only knitter to exhibit whoring tendencies when it comes to yarn. Just last week, I had to admit to myself that I have begun to prostitute my knitting ability in exchange for free yarn. Exhibit 1.

Exhibit 2:

It's the beginnings Mariella from Rowan Tuscan Retreat. I'm knitting it as another display knit for Yarntopia. I went to the store last week to drop of the Cap-Sleeved Top and spent some time talking with Amy. One thing lead to another and I soon found myself in possession of more free yarn.*

Mariella is being knit out of Rowan's new yarn Holiday. When I did my review of Debbie Bliss's Pure Silk, Terby commented that she would like to see more yarn reviews from me. I'm not sure that this yarn is worth a full blown review, because like some of Rowan's other summer yarns, Holiday borders on being a novelty yarn. When it comes to novelty-type yarns, I think that knitters will either knit with the yarn or will not knit with it. No yarn review is going to help them choose between X novelty and Y novelty.

So here's a briefish review: Rowan describes this yarn as "a loosely constructed chainette yarn in a cotton blend." Weird, huh? The photo at right shows what the yarn looks like when you stretch it out and this photo shows what it looks like coming off the ball. I don't understand why Rowan likes making such intricately constructed yarns. I assume that the process must be labor intensive, yet the interesting construction of the yarn is not evident in the yarn as it is used or in the final knitted fabric. I guess the point is to make interesting looking yarn.

I was afraid that the big gaping holes in the yarn would make it difficult to knit with, but it isn't so bad. I do occasionally catch my needle in the yarn, but not nearly as often as I had expected to. Because it's a bulky yarn, it knits up quickly. Very much an instant gratification yarn. However, my gratification was tempered by the care instructions on the ball band: Dry clean or hand wash. Whatever. This baby is going into the washing machine. I'm not certain why I can't. Maybe I will try washing a swatch instead of completely throwing caution to the wind.

The fabric produced reminds me of terry-cloth without the fuzz. Or maybe it's cheesecloth. Or both. It's light and stretchy and I believe that it will make an excellent summer top that is perfect for the sweltering heat of Houston.

* To those who were wondering, I will get to keep these display knits eventually. They go to the store for a few months to entice people to buy yarn and then they come home to live with me permanently.

For the Love of Silk

In which Laura reviews Debbie Bliss's Pure Silk and seems to dislike it, but in reality, she loves it.

I love silk. Of all the fibers out there, silk is my favorite. I love it more than angora and more than cashmere. Silk was the first luxury fiber that I ever owned. When I was a small child, my parents bought me a jacket similar to this one. Similar in that it was silk, quilted, had a mandarin collar, and had a similar "spotty" design. Otherwise, it was red, had fancier frog closures, and was sized for a little girl. I loved that jacket, but was allowed only to wear it for special occasions. Around that time, I was also given a silk fan, which I still have. (I was given a choice between this fan and a fan that had a duck on it. No surprises on which one I picked, huh?)

Ever since I started knitting again I have been dreaming of knitting with 100% silk. But 100% silk is expensive! I couldn't justify buying any silk yarn. I was reduced to petting and gazing longingly at silk yarn in the yarn store. If only, if only....*sigh*

So when Ms. Amylovie gave me the opportunity to knit with Debbie Bliss's new Pure Silk yarn I jumped at the chance. I love this yarn. I may not love everything about the yarn, but I can forgive all its flaws because it is so heavenly to touch.

The yarn is amazingly shiny, soft, and slippery. (I am trying to resist saying that the silk is silky but that does seem like an appropriate word.) I think the silk is reeled silk, but I am not sure. Whatever it is, it more closely matches my image of silk than Reynold's Mandalay does. However, the yarn has a halo (click for photo) that is very obvious. Normally I don't mind a halo on yarn, but the halo on this yarn mutes the shininess of the yarn. The halo becomes more pronounced with washing, which makes me wonder how I will care for the sweater once it is finished. Quite frankly, I was horrified when I saw how much fuzz developed when I washed my swatch. Happily, the fuzz was much less noticeable once the swatch dried.

The yarn comes in 125 m hanks (that's 136.7 yards to you nonmetric types) and after winding one ball, I immediately began wishing that it came already balled. Did I mention that the yarn is slippery? The yarn did not always want to stay where the ball winder placed it. Some of the yarn always slips off the ball resulting in not so pretty balls with loops of yarn sticking out of the bottom. That's not the inside end of the ball--that's yarn from the middle that didn't wind properly. But I was still able to wind the yarn into usable balls, but I do pull the yarn from the outside instead of from the inside. I'm afraid that, if I use the yarn from the center, the ball will explode into a mess of tangles.

Knitting with the yarn is a dream and a nightmare. It's a single ply, loosely spun, and it slips quickly and easily through my hands and over the needles. Pure indulgence for me. However, silk fibers are extremely thin and lack the grabbiness of wool. You know what that means, right? The yarn is splitty. So splitty that I don't take my eyes of my knitting. I have to watch every stitch to make sure that I haven't separated a few tiny strands from the rest. But hey! I love to watch the yarn and I am savoring every minute that I work with it, so looking at it all the time is not so much of a hardship.

Also, the yarn has occasional "slubs." I'm not sure what these slubs are. A group of fibers improperly spun in a short segment? At first I thought the slubs were fuzz stuck to the yarn, but they are attached and pulling on them doesn't work. So I have been carefully knitting through the slubs and then using a crochet hook to pull most of the fuzz to the wrong side of the work.

The knitted fabric is very drape-y and has a nice shine. I wish it had more shine, but the halo gets in the way of that. It doesn't not have very much stretch lengthwise, which I hope means that the fabric won't "grow" like cotton fabric does. My swatch survived a bath in cold water with mild detergent and mild agitation though, as noted before, more of a halo appeared after washing. The yarn is marked machine wash, but I would be hesitant to put it in a washing machine because I wouldn't want too much friction on the surface of the fabric.

The yarn looks good in stockinette and in lace, but not so good in cables. The cables are very flat and rather uninteresting. I'm highly surprised that the patterns published for this yarn include three heavily cabled garments. I was suspicious of using silk for cables and I'm sad to see that I was right to be wary. This silk does not have the body needed to make cables pop. When I look at the cables I made, I don't even think they look like cables. They look more like a texture than a structure. (Also note that the Pure Silk book has a few ribbed patterns. I am not sure how successful ribs would be in this yarn either. I suspect that silk ribs will behave like cotton ribs--not ribby)

One other thing: the first ball that I used had THREE knots in it. I think it was an anomaly though. I've wound five other hanks and did not find any knots.

Machine Washable Purple Sheepies, part 2

I'm feeling better now. In fact, over the weekend, I felt good enough to sit down and read the directions for Rogue and cast on for the sweater. So here's "before" photo of the Cestari fabric, taken after the "after" photo was taken. See? Nice stitch definition in the washed-out photo.


In the comments for the last entry, Karma asked what detergent I used to wash my purple sheepies. I used Ivory Snow--a supposedly gentle detergent. I'm sure that Ivory Snow is more gentle than the Tide HE that I use for normal loads, but I'm not certain how it compares to something like Kookaburra or Eucalan. However, I have used Ivory Snow for washing many knitted garments with no adverse effects. In fact, I have MACHINE washed several knitted garments, even nonsuperwash woolen garments, on gentle cycle in my fabulous front-loader with no adverse effects. So, the fact that I washed my swatch by using the regular cycle was very stupid of me.

Cordelia asked what about Woolite that makes it special. Honestly, I don't know. I looked at my bottle of Woolite, and it doesn't list the ingredients so I don't know if it is a soap or a detergent. (My guess is that it is some sort of detergent or detergent mixture.) I have been told that Woolite really isn't that s'wonderful, but I have yet to read any concrete proof of that.

Also in the comments, Agnes asked if the yarn is itchy. The short answer is yes. The long answer is very long:

The washed swatch is a little more itchy than Cascade 220 and a little less itchy than Lamb's Pride. This is NOT bunny yarn. It is not Aurora 8 or Cashmerino. I wouldn't want to wear it in a skin-tight sweater, I think it will be fine next to the skin in a looser-fitting sweater. To be honest, I'm surprised at the lack of itchiness in this yarn. I expected a high itch-factor when I ordered it.

I actually put a lot of thought into buying this yarn and I was willing to sacrifice softness for other qualities that I wanted. When I look at Rogue, I see a very rugged sweater. The kind of sweater that you would wear hiking in the woods. Cestari looks rugged. So, (I thought) if I was wearing the sweater to go hiking, it had to be very durable. Cestari claims to be durable. Because the sweater was going to get a work out from all that hiking, it had to be machine washable. Cestari is superwash. Finally, I couldn't ever imagine wearing Rogue without something on underneath. It looks like a sweatshirt to me. I intend to wear it like a sweatshirt. As a result, softness was not high on the priority list when I was selecting this yarn.

Things to know before rushing out to buy this stuff
* Cestari feels oily or waxy when knitting. I believe this texture exists because the wool is not overly processed and it still has a lot of lanolin in it.
* Cestari yarn feels stiff coming from the skein and the fabric produced is very stiff. However the stiffness goes away when washed.
* Cestari contains a lot of vegetable matter (i.e. pieces of grass). The vegetable matter can be picked out easily, if you wish.
* Ordering directly from Chester Farms can be an adventure. I suggest calling them rather than using their online order form. (However, the toll-free number did not work for me.)
* Cestari is a bargain: 210 yards, worsted weight, 100% superwash wool for $5.99

Machine Washable Purple Sheepies!

I abused my Cestari swatch. I really abused it. But it didn't felt! At least it didn't felt completely. There was a definite loss of stitch definition.


Yes, I know this photo would be much more informative if I had bothered to take a BEFORE photo. But I didn't take a before photo because I wasn't thinking straight because I am suffering from a bad cold. (A bit of TMI: I haven't gotten out of my PJs for three days. But I have showered!)

The cold also caused me to abuse the swatch much more than I would abuse a sweater made from this yarn. Method of Abuse #1: The yarn manufacturer suggests using soap and not detergent* for washing. Well, I only have detergent and there was no way I was going to the store in my PJs to buy laundry soap just to wash a tiny swatch. Method of Abuse #2: A four-inch swatch all alone in a big washing machine? How would that prove anything? Let's throw two towels in with the swatch! Method of Abuse #3: I completely forgot to set the machine on the delicate cycle. Oops. (Did I mention that I was sick?)

Despite all of this abuse, the swatch was the same size after washing as it was before washing. (After air drying). And I was able to undo the cast-off edge and pull out some stitches. Sure I had to use a little more pulling force than I would have if I hadn't thrown it in the wash, but the stitches still pulled out pretty neatly.

Final verdict: If I hadn't been such a doofus, I'm sure this swatch would have come out beautifully. However, it is good to know that I can abuse this yarn without a complete disaster happening.

Happy Holidays Everyone!!!

*For you science geeks and curious folks: Soaps and detergents are different creatures. Soaps are water-soluble potassium or sodium salts of fatty acids. Detergents are mixtures of surfactants. Surfactants are made in a similar way to soaps, but other hydrocarbons are used instead of fatty acids. Because of differences in the chemical make up of detergents and soap, detergents are usually better for use in hard water. Also, commercial laundry detergents contain other types of chemicals that help clean clothes.

The Incredible Shrinking Swatch

For the last half year, I have been mulling over knitting with linen. It seems like the perfect fiber for summer knitting. The fact that linen is completely machine washable and dryable is a big lure, too. "It gets softer with washing and drying," said Wendy at Yarns 2 Ewe. So, understandably, I was very excited to start working with the Euroflax linen that I got for my birthday. This excitement quickly wore off once I started knitting with the so-called yarn.

First of all, it doesn't feel like yarn. It's more like smooth twine. Or rough string. I had been told of this fact about linen before I got the yarn, but I didn't think it was really that bad. But I was wrong, it is that bad. It hurts. After knitting with the linen for awhile, my fingers feel raw. Not a pleasant knitting experience at all.

Secondly, knitting gauge swatches is tricky because you can't know your gauge until after you wash and dry your swatches. Good thing that I had lots of laundry. I could knit a swatch, throw it in with a load, and measure it. Then, repeat the process. Look at these before and after photos (in a drop-stitch pattern):

Before: 7.5 inches wide, 4.5 inches tall.


After: 5.75 inches wide, 4.5 inches tall.


Amazing! Amazing that it shrunk so much width-wise but didn't shrink at all length-wise. And also an amazing transformation in texture. Burlap bag before and cottony soft after. I don't know if will ever knit with twine linen again. It's rather pricey and not pleasant with which to knit. But right now, my linen is quickly becoming a slightly modified version of Coral and I expect to get a lot of use out of it--after running through the wash a couple of times.