New samples

The Elann mini-skeins for June showed up in Thursday's mail, so I sat right down and swatched up all but one of them.

The yarns (and you can see all the available colors here) are:

Filatura di Crosa Porto Cervo Spray, 100% cotton, recommended 5.0-5.5 mm/US 8-9 needles. This is a nice cotton yarn. Not too exciting to work with--knitting with 100% cotton always feels like knitting with kitchen string to me--but it's a nice yarn and easy to work with. A bit heavy for hot summer, I think, but fine for temps in the 80s. Not a great color range available, but I kind of like Water Lilies and Lilac Blossom. I did my swatch on 6s, as usual, and the fabric seems fine to me--in fact, I got exactly the stitch gauge suggested, 4 st to the inch (they measure over 4" but my swatch is only 10 stitches across plus the edges). I wouldn't call it a chunky weight! (and for what it's worth, the original picture is right-side up--I don't know why it decided to flip sideways when uploaded to the blog!)

Needful Yarns Filtes King Darling, 50% cotton 50% acrylic, recommended 4.0 mm/US 6 needles. This is another nice yarn--in fact, given that a 10-ball bag is under $20--about 1500m/1640 yards, enough for a shell or a t-shirt in some sizes--it's better than nice! I used 6s--for a change, the actual needle size recommended--and got roughly the correct gauge, which produced a lightweight fabric that would be comfortable to wear when the temps get into the 90s and so does the humidity. The sample is a rather dismal camouflage colorway, but there's a nice selection of summery colors, from energetic (Firefly) to soothing (Cornfield). (The same sideways weirdness happened when uploading this picture.)

Stacy Charles Collezione Muse, 65% viscose rayon 25% cotton 10% nylon, recommended 4.0mm/US 6 needles. I like the colors available in this yarn, and it knits up into a nice lightweight summery fabric in vivid summery colors, but it's scratchy! It's one of those bumpy little boucles, and I think it would drive me nuts to wear it. Unless it gets softer after being washed, which is possible--I don't wash these swatches after I knit them up. Note that the color reproductions on the Elann site are a bit washed out--I'm pretty sure my sample colorway is Honeysuckle, and the colors are much stronger and more vibrant than what either the print version or my monitor show me. This picture is fairly close.

Elann.com Limited Edition Mercurio, 70% linen 30% cotton, recommended 3.0-3.25mm/US 2-3 needles AND elann.com Limited Edition Linen Twist, 86% linen 14% cotton, recommended 2.5-3.0mm/US 1-2 needles. I lump these together because I only swatched the Mercurio. Why, you ask? Because I hated the yarns! I was terribly disappointed, because I love linen clothing and have been wanting to make a summer top with a linen/cotton blend yarn. But I had several problems with Mercurio. In the first place, it's made up of many tiny threads, none of which have gotten the message that they're to act as a single unit. As you can see at the top, the cast-on end isn't even pretending to be yarn; it's all dissolved into individual threads. You have to pay attention and use rounded tips with this yarn so you don't accidently pick up threads from neighboring stitches. In the 2nd place, it twisted and kinked something awful during the knitting-up process and I had to stop every few stitches and let it untwist. Third, both these linen yarns seem to be treated with something that makes them feel like dental floss, which I found very unpleasant to handle, and which resulted in a very stiff fabric even on US4 needles. I'm considering throwing this swatch into the next load of laundry I do to see if it becomes any friendlier after washing. Lastly, it's so crisp and sharp that any mistake you make or any unevenness in your work just pops out at you. At any rate, I was unhappy enough with the whole knitting experience with Mercurio that I just couldn't face wrestling around with Linen Twist, so it's still in its little skein.

That's it for this batch!