Persistent Knitter

I’ve been on a bit of a fiber kick lately. My mom visited (see previous post for her in her new Bjerk sweater) and we went on a shopping trip to a few LYS.  I didn’t buy anything at the first store (yay me!) but did at the second.  Here is a sample of each thing from our entire haul:

Starting in the top center, in teh bag. 1 lb of a slate grey/black part silk part wool roving. Oooh yummy. I want to spin this up and use it as the main background color in a two color fair isle.  Moving clockwise, the darkish solid purple is a 100% corriedale, In the center is some blue/purple wool/silk roving. More about that (dissappointment) later.  In the bottom right corner, read wool/silk roving (1 lb worth). Small balls of multicolor 100% merino rovings.  A solid blue corriedale, then the slate wool/silk ball out of the bag.   

My mom purchased around 3 lbs of stuff to spin. I only bought 1.5 lbs.

The blue/purple in the center was a huge dissappointment. It was NOT what was advertised. I’m really quite unhappy with it, so much so that I called the shop and am going to return it this next weekend.  The card on it said the content was wool/silk.  The colors (as you can clearly see even in this picture) are purple and blue.  The name of the color on the label is "Boysenberry Blitz".  When I unwrapped it to spin; I found a hideous mint green color (like what’s in the center of a flat rectangular chocolate mint you get from a restaurant) in the center of the roving that you couldn’t SEE until you had started to draft it out for spinning.   

I spun up a small sample, and then realized the whole thing is riddled with noils.  TONS of them.  There was no listing of "silk noils" anywhere on the label.  You couldn’t see the noils until you had separated out a strand and drafted it a bit (and held it up to a bright light) and then spun it.   The stuff was expensive. $7/ounce expensive.  It’s going back.  If it had been listed as having noils, I wouldn’t have been upset about that, but I expected a perfectly smooth yarn from this.  That and the hidden color in the center pushed me over the edge.

The spun yarn is UGLY.  I tried to take a picture of it, but due to my horrible camera skills and horrible lighting the ugliness didn’t come across.   Anothing thing that happend is the yarn the skien was wrapped in was a glitzy awful novelty yarn and each one of the novelty bits caught in the roving as I was trying to unwrap it. 

Lesson: Check it really really thoroughly before you buy it. Don’t trust the tag (sad but true).  I don’t think my expectations were unreasonable - for it to be labelled properly with the content (include Noils, esp when there are that many!); and don’t hide a wierd color. A spun up sample in the shop of it would have solved that problem nicely.