Wednesday 7 March 2012

Vintage Yarn

I wonder how to use this
I have a lot of vintage yarn and am always looking for opportunities to use it.  One that particularly intrigues me is Patons Beehive Bouclet.  A 3 ply 92% wool, 8% nylon.  The bag full that I have is a wonderful soft turquoise colour.

I experimented with the stitch in the vintage pattern we studied at Susan Crawford's 'Interpreting Vintage Patterns' workshop.  I cast on 32 stitches with the needle sizes given in the pattern and knitted 9 rows of 2x2 rib and 4 repeats of the pattern.  It doesn't come up to the tension required for the Sweater pattern, although that could be remedied.
Nice and knobbly, but doesn't show up the pattern

Unstretched the stitch looks rather effective although the stitch definition isn't clear because of the boucle.  The sweater has a lot of negative ease - it's made smaller than the wearer and is intended to stretch in wear to show off the laciness.  Somehow it loses something when the boucle is stretched like this. 

However, it was a pleasing experiment and I found that the ribbing does look rather good in the boucle, so will maybe look for an all over rib pattern for it.  I would dearly love to find a pattern for this yarn to see what they would have made with it back then.

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