used Lion Brand Wool-ease Thick-N-Quick for one of them. A friend gave me the patterns from a German women's magazine and asked me to make a hat and a long cardigan for her. She wanted them for her holiday trip back home where it is wintry enough to wear something that heavy. So I grab the size 13 needles and dive into a sea of super chunk yarn.First of all, some thoughts on materials: all super bulky yarn is not created equal. The Plymouth Encore Mega that I stranded with mohair and used for the hat shed much less than the Thick-N-Quick I used for the cardi. By the time I finished knitting and seaming the cardi I was covered with charcoal gray fuzz. So you do get what you pay for. It was an economically necessary compromise though, because the damn thing ended up needing close to 900 yards to finish. Two hundred yards more than my initial estimate - yarn substitution is sometimes not quite straightforward. Oh, and after having to go back to Mega Craftmart to get more yarn, I can confirm that the dye lot does matter with Lion Brand-type yarns too, but more on that in a sec.
The hat was a pleasant quick knit, done in about two hours while watching something mindless on TV. (Picture will follow...) Knitting the cardi also went fast; however grafting the top seam (sleeves and shoulders) and seaming up the side and lower sleeve seams took almost as long again as the actual knitting. Sewing up seams is obviously not my strong point. (Note to self: next time think ahead about modifying this sort of thing to be done in the round as much as possible.)
Back to the dye lot issue. The additional 200 yards of T-N-Q I needed to finish were from a
different dye lot, but to my eye I didn't see any difference, and I checked under incandescent and fluorescent light. So imagine my surprise when I got out the digi camera to take a picture and saw this on the screen! Kinda cool in a way, but still NOT what one wants to see after battling all that fuzz. Serious "yikes" moment. I looked at the camera display and then at the sweater itself, back and forth, and the color shift was only visible on the camera when it was shooting without flash. So the dye lot change does matter, at least when photographing under artificial light without a flash. Do I warn the recipient about this?Despite the "issues", I have to admit that I now somewhat understand the appeal of big needle/yarn knits. It does feel productive to get almost an inch of knitting out of every row - a finished item in a matter of hours instead of days/weeks/months! The low time commitment for a smaller item like a hat is such that it removes some of the emotional baggage of giving it away - it only took a couple hours, no biggie if the craftsmanship isn't fully appreciated. While I don't feel the urge to do another super-bulky sweater anytime soon, I can't pooh-pooh the concept anymore. Does this revoke my knitting cred?
