Having been a sewer for so many years, it's intuitive to me about how fabric drapes. (It's also quite obvious - the fabric itself is falling off the bolt.) I know what cotton will do versus linen. I also know (that in few cases) all cottons are not created equal. I know how silk differs from rayon or polyester (and how polyesters differ amongst themselves). I know how wool suiting is supposed to behave, and I know that most upholstery fabrics do not make a cute skirt, despite how appealing the fabric print is.
What continues to puzzle me is how yarn drapes. About a month ago, I was told that I do not want to knit a sweater from bamboo yarn, because the fabric will not hold up to the shaping of the sweater. Bamboo is therefore more appropriate for things like shawls. While I'm appreciative of the tip, it also frustrates me. I don't know enough about [plant and protein] fiber to understand what it's going to do before I even do anything with it. I feel that I'm at the point in my knitting career that I'm trying to become smarter about my yarn choices prior to casting on (oh, I should mention that I'm a big substituter - in almost all cases). I'll also swatch long enough to get gauge (which in my case generally means that I've cast on and am swatching as I go. If I'm not at gauge, I'll sooner make adjustments to the pattern than rip out - a terrible habit, I know.), but I won't swatch big enough to actually figure out how the thing will drape. It seems there are too many variables to handknit fabric - if I knit on a 4 versus a 6, gauge will obviously change, and along with it, drape. But certainly there must be basic principles - am I overlooking them as I jump from project to project? Will I ever learn this?
I'd be skeptical of that, as I know of several sweater (and at least one skirt) patterns knit in bamboo. Though I think those may have been blends...
ReplyDeleteI find a lot of what people say isn't always accurate, and the best thing to do is play around and find out.
Maybe you've had a crash course by now, but yarn drape has to do with the fiber structure. Bamboo doesn't really have any "give" in it as a fiber, so the fabric knit with it is not going to have much give either- it won't spring back into shape but will tend to stretch out (same with cotton and most other plants fibers). That can be a nice quality if it is what you were planning for. In something like a cable pattern though, you generally want some structure and definition, some "spring". That's where wool comes in (and different types of wool, different styles of plying have different amounts of spring- it's just something you have to experiment with). Alpaca doesn't have the springy quality of wool, and tends to "grow" as well. You can pull on the yarn a bit before starting out to get a sense of what's going to happen. Does it stretch and then bounce back? If so, the fabric will be stretchy/bouncy, and hold structure fairly well (unless your gauge is super loose). That doesn't mean you can't make a cotton sweater with cables, or a superspringy lace shawl. It just means it will have a slightly different look.
ReplyDelete