Having all my fleece nicely sorted and labelled and stored, I noticed that I had several buckets of each quality. I should have enough to make several sweaters, shouldn't I?
I studied Mabel Ross' Essentials of yarn design carefully. She had some very definite views about how to spin for sweaters. Her worthy tome gives careful specifications for yarns for various types of sweater. But what kind of sweater should I knit?
After a lot of thought, and a great deal of browsing on Ravelry, I realised that there was one obvious answer: the kind that I CAN knit. I'm not a very good knitter. I like to knit in the round, stocking stitch, one colour, minimal shaping. Anything else is hard.
Back to Mabel Ross, she talks about sport weight and double knitting weight, aran weight, bulky and super bulky jumpers. Which thickness of jumper should I knit?
Again, there is one obvious answer for a novice spinner like myself. I should knit the type of jumper that uses the kind of yarn I can spin most consistently. I'm not experienced enough a spinner to have much of a repertoire.
I can't spin consistent singles thinner than about 30 WPI or thicker than about 18 WPI. Once plied up these range between sport weight and aran weight. At present about 80% of what I spin and ply turns out to be double knitting. About 10% is sport weight (keep for gloves) and 10% is aran weight (keep for hats). This variability means that for every 1 kg of yarn I spin there is only 800g of double knitting for my project, which is a bit irritating. Still, this is progress for me. A year ago my spinning was so uneven that 1kg of spun fibre would only yield 500g of double knitting, and most of that was pretty badly plied.
So, for my sweater I shall spin double knitting because I can spin double knitting. I shall knit a plain, simple sweater because I can knit one. Ravelry is a great source of free patterns - plug in your specifications and find a pattern.
The last consideration is: what grade of fleece should I use? (See the last post for my patented prismatic fleece grading scale). What have I got enough of? Red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Which would be the best for a plain, simple sweater in double knitting? It depends how much of the skin it will be in contact with. Quite a lot, probably. I wear such a jumper over a tee shirt, so my arms and neck are bare under the sweater. Blue (ine downs or Shetland) would be best. Or, if that proves to be not hard-wearing enough, green (medium downs) or even yellow (demi-lustre).
A quick rummage through my fleece buckets shows that I have at least 1.5kg of each of the three grades, so I have a fair choice of yarns to spin.
Next blog post: deciding how to spin the yarn.
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