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Day One: A Tale of Two Yarns or why I love Malabrigo and my ongoing issues with variegated yarns
This post is part of the Knit & Crochet Blog Week 2011.
I was going to post a photo of the yarns, and my camera just isn’t working right. 🙁 You can see the gorgeous colors here, on their website.
Is it possible to fall in love with a yarn? I think so. When I first joined my Monday night knit and crochet group, I noticed a lot of people knit socks. They would hold up their lovely creations, and I would ask, “what yarn is that?”. Again and again people would say “Malabrigo”.
Yarn 1: Malabrigo Sock in Azules
What really attracts me to Malabrigo yarns in general is the colors. The Azules, and any of the solid colorways, produces this heathered, tone-on-tone look. It gives a project a bit more visual interest than a single, flat shade but because it’s slight variations of the same color it doesn’t overwhelm the project. It’s pleasantly soft and a real pleasure to have up against the skin.
Yarn 2: Malabrigo Sock in Caribeno
The Caribeno colorway is comprised of gorgeous, bright hues, and I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with it yet. It’s my whole love-hate relationship with variegated yarns. The color combos can be so pretty, but I’m not a big fan of pooling. I know that to some people pooling IS the point of variegated yarns. I think these people are the same ones who don’t mind striped socks where the stripes on the left foot and right foot don’t actually match up exactly. This is perfectly ok, but it gets the little OCD voice inside my head started up.
Just popping in to say “hi” as part of Knit Crochet Blog Week.
Totally agree. I love Malabrigo (sock, worsted, twist…) but always struggle when it comes to knitting a variagated yarn. They look gorgeous on the skein, but I just never know how they’ll knit up.
Cameras always let me down too. The colours of the Malabrigo are lovely. I am not keen on pooling but I don’t mind stripes that don’t match.
Malabrigo makes some of the most saturated and vibrant yarns around. Love them! And when it comes to hand-dyed variegated yarns, pooling is extremely likely. Using tonal variegated yarns is a good way around that, unless you’re looking for a brighter contrast.
I have to agree with you, variegated yarn stresses me out. Even when working with my favorite yarn ever (Malabrigo Silky Merino) the variegation in the yarn actually made me hate the project!
I just love Malabrigo, I just used some of their worsted to make a hat and didn’t know they had sock yarn too. Now that I am falling in love with knitting socks I will have to see about getting some. I can just see myself loosing all track of time trying to pick out colors. Thanks for the inspiration! I hope your camera gets fixed soon!
Thanks! I think my camera is ok. It just always does weird things when I’m on a deadline.
I’ve about decided that the Caribeno is just my happy yarn. It makes me happy to look at, happy to pet, and I accept that I may never actually make it up into anything.
Hi!
That is quite lovely! We live in such dinefrfet worlds. Just going by the pictures, I’d have had no idea what that would even be used for. I have a hard time imagining how cold it must get up there.