The best yarn?
After making a post about Drops, that I recommended mostly for the very nice technique videos in their webpage, but also for their yarn's price/quality ratio, I started thinking about what are the best yarns out there. What do other people use and recommend?
The feature I love the most about Ravelry, and the one I use the most by far, is their excellent advanced search. The great thing about it is all the possibilities it gives you to narrow the search results and to order them in such a way that you can easily make sense of what may be a list with thousands of items.
You can for example lookup all yarn and order it by 'most projects'. Then you'll see what yarns people prefer to use. These are not necessarily the best yarn around. Looking at the results it is obvious it is more like the cheapest yarn around ;). The top of the list is occupied by some awful acrylic yarn I'd never recommend and much less use.
The first good yarn you find is Cascade 220, in the third position at the time I'm writing this post. This is 100% wool and really cheap. It is most definitely its price/quality ratio that makes it so popular, but not only. They have the most amazing variety of colours. I don't know any other yarn with so many options, although these are plain colours, nothing fancy.
I've been wanting to knit a dark green sweater and surprisingly even though it is such a standard colour I haven't been able to find it from anywhere else but Cascade. I'm guessing there are a lot of people buying this yarn for a similar reason. So I'm planning on making a certain purchase in the future, but right now I have forbidden myself to buy any more yarn. I'll say no more, I'm sure there are very few knitters out there who don't understand exactly what I mean.
The nice folks at Cascade also offer very nice free patterns to go with their yarn. The best way to find them is again using the search feature on Ravelry, or you can go directly to their webpage. I particularly love their cables sweaters and cardigans.
The yarn that is higher in the list that I've actually used is Malabrigo. This is not cheap yarn, but wonderful baby-merino hand-painted yarn. It is beautifully dyed and surreally soft, and quite cheap for its quality, even though, I repeat, it is not cheap.
Merino is a breed of sheep that makes the highest quality, softest, and warmest wool. It is therefore relatively expensive, but still much cheaper than mohair, cashmere, angora and the like. In case you don't know, none of the aforementioned are produced from sheep. The first two are the fleece of a breed of goat and the last of a breed of rabbit. And to make things complicated, mohair is the fleece of the angora goat and the rabbit is named after the goat because its fleece produces a similar yarn.
Still not all merino is equal and Malabrigo is very good quality. It can be tricky to use because the hand dyed process makes for irregular colour even in the same dye lot. I believe this is not a big problem with the variegated colours and that this colour irregularity adds a lot to its beauty. So this is not a bad thing at all. Some people complain that it felts too easily and it is indeed my experience that it felts a bit with normal use. This is OK if you can tolerate the fuzzy look. Otherwise you must make sure to buy machine-washable yarn which is the one guaranteed not to felt. I think that Malabrigo Sock yarn is the only Malabrigo that is so, but I'm not sure.
It goes without saying, there is no such thing as the best yarn, not only different projects will ask for different yarn, not only it is subjective and a matter of personal taste, but in addition your taste is bound to change regularly, unless you're a very strange person indeed. So if you're a typical knitter, you'll be anything but faithful to your yarn. Go down to the yarn store and make up your own mind about what yarn do you love the most... at least for the moment. Tomorrow is another day!... to buy more yarn. Except for me, I'm forbidden to do so.
The feature I love the most about Ravelry, and the one I use the most by far, is their excellent advanced search. The great thing about it is all the possibilities it gives you to narrow the search results and to order them in such a way that you can easily make sense of what may be a list with thousands of items.
You can for example lookup all yarn and order it by 'most projects'. Then you'll see what yarns people prefer to use. These are not necessarily the best yarn around. Looking at the results it is obvious it is more like the cheapest yarn around ;). The top of the list is occupied by some awful acrylic yarn I'd never recommend and much less use.
The first good yarn you find is Cascade 220, in the third position at the time I'm writing this post. This is 100% wool and really cheap. It is most definitely its price/quality ratio that makes it so popular, but not only. They have the most amazing variety of colours. I don't know any other yarn with so many options, although these are plain colours, nothing fancy.
I've been wanting to knit a dark green sweater and surprisingly even though it is such a standard colour I haven't been able to find it from anywhere else but Cascade. I'm guessing there are a lot of people buying this yarn for a similar reason. So I'm planning on making a certain purchase in the future, but right now I have forbidden myself to buy any more yarn. I'll say no more, I'm sure there are very few knitters out there who don't understand exactly what I mean.
The nice folks at Cascade also offer very nice free patterns to go with their yarn. The best way to find them is again using the search feature on Ravelry, or you can go directly to their webpage. I particularly love their cables sweaters and cardigans.
The yarn that is higher in the list that I've actually used is Malabrigo. This is not cheap yarn, but wonderful baby-merino hand-painted yarn. It is beautifully dyed and surreally soft, and quite cheap for its quality, even though, I repeat, it is not cheap.
Merino is a breed of sheep that makes the highest quality, softest, and warmest wool. It is therefore relatively expensive, but still much cheaper than mohair, cashmere, angora and the like. In case you don't know, none of the aforementioned are produced from sheep. The first two are the fleece of a breed of goat and the last of a breed of rabbit. And to make things complicated, mohair is the fleece of the angora goat and the rabbit is named after the goat because its fleece produces a similar yarn.
Still not all merino is equal and Malabrigo is very good quality. It can be tricky to use because the hand dyed process makes for irregular colour even in the same dye lot. I believe this is not a big problem with the variegated colours and that this colour irregularity adds a lot to its beauty. So this is not a bad thing at all. Some people complain that it felts too easily and it is indeed my experience that it felts a bit with normal use. This is OK if you can tolerate the fuzzy look. Otherwise you must make sure to buy machine-washable yarn which is the one guaranteed not to felt. I think that Malabrigo Sock yarn is the only Malabrigo that is so, but I'm not sure.
It goes without saying, there is no such thing as the best yarn, not only different projects will ask for different yarn, not only it is subjective and a matter of personal taste, but in addition your taste is bound to change regularly, unless you're a very strange person indeed. So if you're a typical knitter, you'll be anything but faithful to your yarn. Go down to the yarn store and make up your own mind about what yarn do you love the most... at least for the moment. Tomorrow is another day!... to buy more yarn. Except for me, I'm forbidden to do so.
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