The Knitting Fiend

I found this gorgeous peachy-pink mercerized cotton at Hobby Lobby. Nice color, nice sheen, smooth and tightly spun. So, it should be both pretty and fairly durable. Better yet, it’s much more enjoyable to knit than the Lion Kitchen Cotton.

At $3.99 a skein, the Sinfonia¹ brand is a bargain. There are 200 meters per 100 gram skein, which is sportweight. This yarn knits up nicely single or double stranded. (Yes, I tried both ways.)

As usual, when working on a generator, I’ll be knitting my sweater double stranded and in stockinette. You can see the stockinette swatch to the left; my gauge is about 3.6 st/inch.

I washed and dried my swatch I found the swatch shrank about 8% in length; it didn’t shrink in width. (According to Dr. Richard Barrans of Procter and Gamble, mercerized cotton is shrinks less than unmercerized cotton. This doesn’t mean it’sno shrink. I find mercerized cotton shrunk less than the Lion Dish Cloth cotton, but I don’t want my sweater to be 8% shorter than I planned when I designed it. So, I wash swatches. I wash all my swatches. )

I’ll be knitting a short sleeve, short midriff baring raglan cardigan out of this.

There seems to be so much interest in knitting sweaters top down, I decided to give that a whirl. Since I haven’t written a generator for top down knitting, this involves coding. I coded the yoke into a new pattern generator, and I’m about to cast on. We’ll see how it ends up!

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1. Label information: Sport weight (100 grams= 200 meters); recommended needles size 3 1/4 mm (US size 4); mercerized cotton (algodon mercerizado); hand or machine wash in cold with mild soap; do not bleach. Rinse in cold; lay flat to dry. Rinse with water and salt in case you combine colors. Made in Mexico, Omega Distributora.