I have recently been swatch-crazy. As I don’t necessarily have time to knit all of the many cardigans and jumpers that I want from other people’s patterns, I’ve decided to make a tension square for each instead, to give me a taste.
Julieta from Knitshop was kind enough to give me a couple of sample sized skeins of her Cotton plied Wool yarn to test out recently. It has a lovely soft handle, and is a double knitting weight. I decided to try out a pattern from one of Susan’s Odhams knitting books from the 1940s, in tension square form. It is called ‘asparagus stitch’, which is worth knitting for the name alone!
As I had two skeins, and in the interest of giving the yarn a fair trial, I also knitted up a square in a stocking and garter stitch combination. You can see from the results that as a smooth yarn, it has very good stitch definition making it work well on plain or patterned knitting.
The yarn drapes beautifully and the combination of wool and cotton (40% and 60%, respectively) will work well at this time of year for spring-to-summer garments. Knitshop recommend that it is best knitted on 3-4mm needles. I decided to give both a go, so knitted the red, patterned swatch on 3.75mm needles, and the orange-apricot, plainer swatch on 3.25mm needles. Both worked well for this yarn.
Cotton plied Wool is available from the Knitshop site (or shop, of course) in a very pretty range of colours, both solid and variagated and will cost you a very reasonable £6.89 for 100g, which has a meterage of 225m.
Did you block your swatch of this yarn? Lovely colours.
But, of course! I wet blocked both tension squares. I’m really pleased with how the yarn knits up and am deciding what to use it for at the moment.