I recently spun over a pound of incredibly soft Merino with Angora from Marvin. I dyed the Merino prior to blending it with the Angora. Believe it or not, I almost didn’t spin it all up. About an ounce in, I looked at it, and I didn’t like it.
I received lots of encouragement from my spinning peers, however, so I continued on and am very pleased that I did. Not only do I find it incredibly gorgeous, it is so soft and cozy! It just screams, “cardigan with big wooden buttons,” to me.
When you buy commercial yarn, it will come with a label that gives information to help you determine how it should be knitted (or crocheted). This information not only includes a needle or hook size and the stitches and rows in 4″, but there are also other clues. A crafter can reasonably expect to find the yardage, weight (in oz and g), and the yarn weight (scale from 0-6). With this information, a crafter can determine how to knit or crochet the yarn.
With handspun yarn, this information is not provided to the spinner. Instead, the spinner must use the information at hand to create an educated guess, and use this guess as a starting point. The first piece of information, and usually most easily obtained, is the weight of the yarn. I prefer to use ounces for this, and you will understand why in a moment. The second bit of information is the yardage. This is a little more difficult to calculate. There are a few methods, but I prefer to use my niddy noddy and count yardage as I wind my yarn off the bobbin when plying is complete.
With the yardage and weight in ounces, I can get a pretty good estimate of yards per pound. I divide my yardage by the number of ounces and then multiply the result by 16. Now, back to my handspun Merino/Angora. After calculating, I came up with 1500 ypp. According to my handy dandy yards per pound chart, this yarn would probably knit up like a light sport or heavy fingering weight yarn. But wait! This yarn has Angora fiber, which is much lighter in weight than sheep’s wool. That means I can expect more yardage in the same number of ounces. Now what? Well, I can find the yarn’s wraps per inch (the number of times the yarn can be wrapped around a 1″ measurement device without overlapping), or I can make an educated guess for the swatch.
Swatch? To some people that’s a four-letter word. To others, it’s a strict rule. I almost always swatch. The only time I don’t is when I’m using a commercial yarn that I’ve used very recently in the same stitch pattern. For my handspun, I decided to guess the needle size was a US4, and I was correct. It was the perfect size for the structure I wanted.
Next, I decided to swatch buttonholes. I worked the one in the pattern which had single yarn overs, then I worked a second one with double yarn overs for a larger buttonhole since I would be using thinner yarn and bigger buttons. Surprisingly, the smaller hole worked with my plastic test button, most likely due to the innate elasticity of the Merino wool.
Now I’m ready to knit. Hooray!