...and a warning :)

Caution, pissiness ahead

I picked up some Paton’s SWS - Soy wool stripes - a couple of weeks ago.  While I’m not especially fond of stripes, the idea of self-striping yarn has its appeal.  I have worked with one other such several years ago, Noro’s Silk Garden.  I have talked about that before and though I found the stripes to be charming and the colors lovely, they were the only things about that yarn that I liked.  Having played with the SWS for the last couple of days, I regret to inform you that my feelings about the new yarn are about the same.

First of all, I don’t care for slubby yarns.  That’s not usually a problem, as I simply leave them to those better able to appreciate their unique characteristics.  I ask you, does that yarn look slubby to you?  It didn’t look slubby to me and yet there was this…

...which I didn’t notice until last night by which time I had worked up most of the first ball.  And, as I knit the stuff up, there was this…

...and this.

If they were slubs, there really should be more than two of them in the entire ball of yarn.  Alas, they weren’t slubs, they were knots.  To be fair, they were apparently done with the intention of preserving the color flow and I left them there for the same reason.  But I really don’t want knots in my yarn.  Call me rigid, but I feel that my $6 entitles me to a smooth, unbroken 110 yards of yarn.

The yarn doesn’t work up badly, but it’s slow going because it has almost no twist.  It’s just lots of tiny fibers bundled together.  This characteristic makes it beyond splitty.  I don’t usually have a problem with that - even with notoriously splitty yarns - but this is orders of magnitude worse.  There’s no watching TV while working with this stuff because if you take your eyes off it for a second, you’re sticking your needle into the yarn rather than through the stitch and horribleness ensues.

I pulled this out of the stash with the idea of making a matching cowl and pair of mitts.  Sadly, that’s not going to work out.  Even with its issues, were the yarn skin-soft, I would proceed.  It isn’t.  I can’t always tell until I have worked it up whether a yarn is going to be acceptable to my skin.  And there have been some surprises.  Some yarns that felt harsh in the ball worked up to be very comfortable.  Some that felt soft in the ball turned out to be intolerable.

In the ball, this felt slick and somewhat hard - but not prickly or scratchy.  The hand of the fabric is different.  When I held the fabric up to my neck, it felt as though I had been knitting with flexible emery boards - very scratchy and uncomfortable.  Poop…

The fabric is attractive and the colors are nicely matched, I think.  Though the ball appears to have a lot of the orange/gold, that’s only because that was the last color in the length.  Most of the colors are subdued - a dull teal, a dull bronze and a dull plum.  The gold is really only a highlight and while this isn’t an intrinsic fault of the yarn, it was disappointing as the overall effect is much quieter and much more masculine than I was looking for.

So my questions are these:

1.  Why, when the yarn is self-striping, is it’s quality so poor?  Is this a rule of some kind?  My inner cynic suspects that the manufacturer believes we’ll be so taken with the colors and how they work, that we’ll forgive the questionable quality.

And…

2.  Since this is not going to work for clothing, and since the lack of twist means that it probably isn’t good for anything that would get a lot of wear, what do I do with it now?