Connie Lee Lynch
Sep 26, 20173 min
Since the crazy reaction to my last color pooling project, which turned into an unexpected pattern, which turned into a CLASS at my LYS, I've been playing with color more than usual. Marina, the shop owner at Yarn Matters, and I were perusing their yarns in stock for additional options for potential students and we landed on a super yummy blend from Malabrigo called Silky Merino. It's 51% silk and 49% merino wool and BONUS, it's a Z twist yarn, which means it's perfect for crocheters!
If you're unfamiliar with yarn twists, it's pretty simple. When yarns are spun, the fibers are spun either clockwise or counterclockwise and so the fibers slant either one way or another. An S twist yarn slants the same way as the middle of the S does, or like this \ (backslash) whereas a Z twist yarn slants the other way, the same as the middle of the Z or as a / (forward slash).
So. When crocheters work with S twist yarns, which is what the majority of yarns are spun to be, the twist UN-twists a bit. That doesn’t happen when S twist yarns are knit. Doris Chan has some excellently informative posts about it here and here. Experienced crocheters may not even notice this, but several of my beginner crochet students have absolute fits over their yarn splitting because of the twist loosening up!
This colorway is called Bahia and it reminds me of crayons! It has short segments of red, yellow, purple, teal, and blue. I was curious to see how this would work up using the argyle color pooling technique because the color segments are so short. Normally, I recommend color segments that will give you 5 - 8 stitches per color but I knew I'd only get one or two stitches per color with this colorway when I unwound it.
But they were pretty clean color changes, so I was excited to try it! I suspected it would have a bit of a plaid look to it. So I pulled out my crochet hooks and started swatching!
Using the linen stitch and my F/3.75mm hook, I got 24 single crochet stitches in a full color repeat (I don't count the ch 1 sps for simplicity's sake), so I did my starting chain with 48+ stitches, and began the linen stitch with red for 23 sc across, or one less sc than a full color repeat. My color sequence looked something like this: 2 red/orange, 2 yellow, 2 orange/red, 1 purple, 4 teal/blue, 1 red, 5 purple/blue/purple, 1 red, 6 purple/blue/purple.
Now. Since the yellow stands out the most to me, I made that my target color. So I did my best to make certain that I got two yellows every time and that they stacked up one off each time. I had to pay really close attention to my tension to get my red, yellow, red sequence in the right place and sometimes it would be some combination of purple/red/orange, yellow, orange/red/purple. The other two pops of red I also tried to line up as well as I could, but I'd still be working on this scarf months later if I obsessed about the other colors to the same degree as my target color! So I let the transitional purple go where it needed to, sometimes showing up more than others. And I grouped the teal and blue together, too, although most of the time it was two of each.
And this is how it turned out!
Was it a little more fiddly than having wider segments of fewer colors? Yeah. But was it still neat seeing it come together? Absolutely! And in true color pooling addict fashion, I now want to go make scarves out of all the other Silky Merino colorways!
Or maybe I should just throw this stunning scarf around my neck and go for a stroll down this path.