As those of you who know me, or who read me on any kind of regular basis know, my professional training is in science.  So when faced with a problem, in this case, my less than enthusiastic feeling for my last knitting project, my immediate approach to figuring out what went wrong, is to experiment.

So here’s the problem.  The lace I knit for my cowl did not show the pattern as well as I would like.  I suspect that it is due to a problem with the weight of the yarn I used.  I tried to spin the yarn to match the characteristics of the yarn recommended in the project.  Since all I have are the weight and the length of the skein, the best I can do without ponying up the cash for a sample is approximate.  Different spinning techniques can end up with different diameters of yarn  that are the same weight and length.  It all depends on

how much air you trap between the fibers.  So anyway, my feeling was that the way lace looks is related to the ratio between the yarn diameter and the size of the knitting needle.  To examine this, I took some blechy acrylic yarn that has been hanging out in my craft room and worked up a series of swatches with 5 different needle sizes.  I chose a simple lace pattern that I got out of a new Kindle book Lace Knitting to Go (Pattern Cards) by

Andrea Tung.  I wasn’t wowed by the book, but it has some nice lace patterns both written out and charted.  It is more valuable to me as a reference in my quest to learn to design lace patterns than as a source of patterns to use. (More on that later.)

So you can see the tags on this that have the needle sizes written on them.  Definitely, different needle sizes give a different look.  For this one, I like the 10 and the 13.  The yarn I was using is about 2.5 mm.

Needle Gauge US     (mm)             Ratio of Needle to Yarn

3                         3 .25                                1.3

5                         3.75                                 1.5

10                       5.00                                 2.4

13                        9.00                                3.6

15                       10.00                               4.0

Now there is not guarantee that every lace pattern is going to look best with the same ratio.  So I guess that leads me back to my old Nemesis… swatching.  Swatching goes very much against the slap-dash way that I like to approach knitting, but as I spend more time and user better materials I am feeling more and more of a need to make sure the product is going to come out as I imagine it.   Sigh….

Here is another experiment that I did.  Some of you may remember that I recently worked up some Finnland sheep fleece that turned out to felt very well.  Read about that here, if you haven’t already.  So I am planning a felted project for that fleece, but I wanted to know if plying would have an effect on how the knitted fabric felted.  I also varied the stitch.  The tops are stockinette stitch and the bottoms are garter.

It’s hard to tell from these photos, but the plied wool felted much more evenly, and more densely than the singles.  I also prefer the stockinette stitch to the garter for a smooth looking felt.

I want to do a felted bag, but I am having trouble finding a pattern that I like for this project.  I will probably end up designing it myself, and I am thinking about doing entrelac or modular.  I keep coming back to colors similar to what I did my slippers in… Here are the some pieces who’s color inspires me.

Or this one from nature.  I’ve reduced the color count to start getting at a palette.

 

Any thoughts?