My favorite LYS is having a big sale this week, and I didn't go to knit-night as usual because I was sick, so I went in this morning to do a little stash enhancement. And ooh, I thought I'd found the yarn for my Wallaby sweater. It was all cotton but not stringy, pilly, or excessively heavy; surprisingly inexpensive; there was a colorway I really liked and there was just enough of it on the shelf to make a Kati-sized sweater if I cleaned them out. Only one problem: I finally had to admit that as much as I liked it in the skein, that colorway was just not going to look good with my complexion. It was too pink, and too much of a ruddy pink. A little more lavendar could have worked, but not this.
I did, however, buy enough of it for a throw I plan to make next, a radiating star blanket. (The pattern is on Ravelry, but this way all y'all can see what it looks like.) I was planning to do it in Plymouth Kudo, a long-color-repeat cotton/rayon/silk blend I'm looking forward to trying, but the LYS won't be getting it in for a few weeks yet, and I expect to be ready to start my next project before then. Besides, photos of finished projects suggest that the Kudo's color transitions are fairly harsh, and I haven't liked the radiating star blankets I've seen with hard stripes. This may work out better. What I've got is multicolored but not striped. Each ply is a different color, so it should knit up with a tweedy look that hopefully will add visual interest without overwhelming the star pattern.
As I'm shopping, though, I'm realizing that I don't really like buying just one ball to sample with the wool-free stuff. Maybe not so much the alpaca, but with non-animal fibers, I question the usefulness of that single ball in my knitting life. I can do a lot of projects with a single ball of wool (or alpaca, really), depending on the yarn weight: winter hats, scarves, mittens. But cotton or linen doesn't make good winter wear. And there's not a whole lot of other one-skein projects I'm into.
So I'm thinking that I should buy enough for a project I would actually make. Granted, it will cost more that way, but yarn that is never used and never will be is money wasted. A lot of people do this and buy sweater quantities. I'm not willing to go that far, though. I am not a small woman.
Actually, an aside here. I'm a slightly-below-average woman -- which is absolutely unforgiveable in this country. This article here makes an excellent point right in the first 2 paragraphs: the average American man is a little bigger than designers think, but he can walk into any non-specialty store in the country and find fashionable clothes that fit him, look good on him, and unless he is very eccentric, suit his tastes.
The average woman, on the other hand, is defined as "plus size". If you've ever tried to shop plus-size clothing (and statistically speaking, more than half the women reading this have), then you know that plus-size is the nemesis of fashionable, or good fit, or variety, or generally worth wearing except to not be naked. More than half of the female population is defined as niche! It's insane, it's stupid, there's no logical reason for it, but institutionalized sexism sure explains it well.
I also like the quote from the model on the second page, who is considered "plus size" because she wears a 10 (horrors!): "On the street, I'm skinny. At castings, I'm a cow." This is getting into "scary stuff" land.
Anyway, back to yarn. A sweater for an average size person takes between 1500 and 2000 yards of yarn. I don't care to buy quite that much at once, especially since that would typically be over a $100. Not always; the yarn I was looking at today would have been around $50 for the 1800 yards I need for the Wallaby (as I said, unusually inexpensive), but usually good basic yarns starts around $3/100 yards and goes up from there.
However, I have REALLY been enjoying working on a simple circular shawl. Specifically a Strawberry Pie Shawl somewhat blasphemously converted into a circle instead of semicircle. (I say blasphemous because the design specifically made it semicircular because she doesn't like circular shawls.) The radiating star blanket is the same general idea, as are several others on my list to do. They're easy, sometimes I don't even have to carry the pattern which makes them excellent waiting room knitting, you can pick them up and put them down at any point because they're circular, and they look awesome. The nasty critical part of me gripes "isn't that a waste of your mad knitting skillz", but the rest of me goes "Maybe, but I don't care because it's so damn fun! Nyah!"
One of those in worsted or bulky takes 500 to 600 yards of yarn. That's a doable quantity to buy at a time. Not necessarily cheap in some stuff, but doable. And there's a lot of flexibility in what fiber you use. Even a cotton blanket can be nice when the themostat is just a little low, or if you want something to sit on at the park. Or just to look nice draped across furniture.
Thinner yarns will take more yards, but they also come more per skein. I'll just have to dig into some patterns I like and figure out some average yardages.
So, in conclusion: Yay yarn!
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