Yarn tales

I have decided to pick one craft, crocheting, and stick with it.  That way I can get really good at one thing.  As a scientist, I have decided to approach it like I would anything else.  I am doing research, getting opinions, getting to know experts (ie.: one of my good friends, initials E.F-M from the U.S.A.), writing notes and of course, my favourite: experimenting (this is why I am a scientist in real life).

You can't crochet without knowing a bit about yarn.  It all started because I bought some yarn from an artisan hand spinner on the Isle of Skye.  The yarn wasn't labelled, and the spinner just said, use big needles and drop lots of stitches.  To someone that doesn't know how to knit and could barely crochet, I didn't know what that meant.  So, I brought it home, picked an easy scarf pattern that I thought would work for me, and then proceeded to crochet it.  I used the wrong hook size and needless to say the project didn't work out.  This was three years ago.  I had always intended to unravel and start over.  Three years later, I decided to unravel and start over. But, as I unraveled the yarn, it started unwinding too.  This made re-crocheting like re-crocheting a bunch of hair.  Not to mention, it had lots of kinks and twists in it.

The yarn

Fortuitously, my good friend (EFM) recently sent me some cotton yarn that she had unraveled and reworked.  She said she washed it, dried it, and wound it into a ball.  So I wondered whether I could do the same with the Alpaca yarn?  Since it was alpaca and not cotton, I wondered whether this technique worked for any type of yarn.  So, I went on the internet, as you do, and found some additional resources that suggest the same technique for lots of different yarns.  Unwind, wrap, soak in hot water (with hair shampoo or wool wash if washing), spin cycle, dry, wind.  Most of these are from people that unravel old sweaters and recycle/upcycle the yarn by making it into new project, selling it, or donating it to charity.  I also found a great way of estimating yarn weight, using the WPI or weight per inch technique.  Basically you wrap your yarn around a ruler and measure how many wraps you get per inch. Then you use a chart that estimates yarn weight by the number of wraps per inch.  So now I know my yarn is bulky or chunky and requires a hook between 6.5-9 mm.  I will update this post with the washing results.