Wednesday, November 27, 2013 at 4:01 AM
Hi everyone
As you may know, if you’ve read my posts about crocheting:
I found my way here a few months ago as a beginner, and over the past few months I’ve learned a whole lot from the patterns here, the forum, the users here, and occasionally from YouTube videos.
The other day while shopping, I stumbled upon ribbon yarn more by chance than because I was specifically looking for it. It was at Müller Drogerie; they’ve recently set up a little corner there with yarn, crochet hooks, and all that stuff. Apparently, there are now also “MyBoshiSets” that come with a pattern and yarn, etc., all included. I think that’s pretty nice, but I wanted to make something myself.
So I looked around for a while, but at first, of course, there was only that acrylic yarn again, and I really don’t like that at all. I’ve already mentioned that several times here in the forum. Just when I was about to give up, I found this extremely fluffy 100% cotton ribbon yarn. 4.99 per skein, each with a length of 29 meters and weighing 50 grams. I thought to myself, that’s a bit pricey. But I really wanted to try it out. I picked up a size 8 crochet hook to go with it, since I didn’t have one yet.
And once I got home, I tried out the ribbon yarn. It really wasn’t easy at first. When I removed the label, the ribbon yarn was a bit, well, inflexible. That’s just my personal impression, though. It could also be because I haven’t had years of crocheting practice yet. I couldn’t get much done with double crochet at first, so I started with single crochet and experimented a bit. Usually, there’s a small gauge printed on the yarn labels, but this time there was nothing like that on it, so I had to experiment because I’d never used the combination of ribbon yarn and a size 8 hook before. After trying a few things and diligently crocheting and unraveling over and over, the ribbon yarn became more flexible and easier to work with. Then double crochet and such worked too. I had trouble with the outermost stitches of each row for quite a while; they didn’t turn out very even, despite the turning chains.
I think I’ll make something fancy out of the four skeins of ribbon yarn I have. Ribbon yarn is really lovely. But I do think I wouldn’t want to crochet with ribbon yarn every day. It feels good, you get used to it, and it looks nice once the stitches become more even and all that, but it’s really more for very special projects, not so much for something in between.
What do you all think? Could it be that ribbon yarn is always a bit more expensive than regular cotton yarn? What have your experiences with ribbon yarn been? Do you like using/working with it?
Is it more for crocheting, or can you knit with it too?