Jane's Hooked on Crochet

A place to write about my crocheting, things I'm learning, book reviews, ideas, projects in mind, works in progress, patterns, photos, fair entries, whatever...

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Yarn Review - Bernat Natural Blends Soy

At the end of Sunday's long rambling post about the show, was a note about a new yarn that I had to play with. Sunday evening I started swatching with the Bernat Natural Blends Soy. This fiber is 50% soy, and 50 % acrylic. It is a worsted weight, has a nice subtle sheen, and nice stretch.
I started with the hook size recommended on the yarn band, an H. First I used an aluminum Boye hook and made a small swatch of single crochet, then I ripped that back and changed to a Sonshapes wooden hook and made about 5 rows of single crochet, I measured and made notes of gauge on both hooks. Then I switch to a different wooden hook, and made a swatch of singles, half-doubles and doubles. I then frogged that swatch and started over with a swatch of Tunisian Simple Stitch, I ripped that back and using a plastic Easy Tunisian hook, size L, made a swatch of a lacy Tunisian pattern.
On all the hooks this yarn slide smoothly and made beautiful stitches with great definition. I had no problem with the yarn splitting. The yarn also frogged (ripped out) like a dream. I simply started winding the yarn back onto the ball and the stitches slipped out of the swatch smoothly. Even after swatching and frogging a half dozen times, you couldn't see any difference in the yarn used and that which hadn't been used.
I had purchased this fiber just to experience it, and write a yarn review; so I only bought 2 skeins. Each skein is 2.5 oz, approximately 134 yards. I figured that I didn't have enough to actually made anything substantial, but maybe I could manage a baby hat and booties, or maybe a small sweater. I flipped through all my patterns without finding anything using a small amount of worsted weight yarn, so I went to Google and entered "baby sweater" & crochet & worsted. Most baby items are made with sport weight or fingering weight yarn and I didn't want to spend all night sorting through patterns. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the first items on the list was a baby sweater that used 3 oz of yarn, and it was Tunisian!!
Yesterday I made up the sweater, tonight at Michaels Sit N Stitch I made up the matching hat. Tonight I tried to work up some booties to go along with the sweater and hat, but didn't have quite enough yarn. I'll take some pictures of the sweater and hat tomorrow.
I made up a swatch of a variety of stitches, measured it and I'm getting ready to go to the next step of the swatch testing. First I'll soak the swatch in cold water and let it lay flat dry. Tomorrow I'll throw it in the washer and dryer with a regular load of laundry. Then we'll see how nice the fiber looks after that, and measure to see if it has shrunk any.
I'm already planning to make a sweater in this yarn. I just have to decide on a stitch pattern, regular crossed doubles look good, Tunisian Simple stitch looks good, maybe a lacy stitch,....

2 Comments:

At Friday, July 13, 2007, Blogger Pam said...

Thanks for the great review of this yarn! -Pam

 
At Monday, January 07, 2008, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This review was so helpful! Thanks!! I bought the light green shade and have been trying to decide if I should put the time into a knitted baby blanket when I wasn't sure its quality. I am going to start tonight!

 

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