I have to admit, my first reaction was that $17.85 a skein is nothing, but upon reading the further details, I have to agree that that wouldn’t be a good use of my money.
I’m willing to spend a hundred dollars on yarn for a sweater for me, and figure that the entertainment value of the knitting(and planning) plus the wearing value of the sweater more or less make it a good use of the money.
But somewhere around here I’ve got a skein of beautiful linen rope yarn. It’s not really enough yardage to knit anything with, but even at 40% off it cost enough I’m not eager to buy a second skein of it.
And so it sits, and sits.
(Actually, it’s waiting for September. I’ve cast on only one project in August and I intend to keep it that way. September, however, is fair game. I’m plotting two colorwork children’s sweaters, and who knows what else. Not that they’ll all get finished. But to start them . . . )
How long ago was this? I’m going to guess it was when clothing was still mostly made in the USA. Nowadays everything is made in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, etc. and is far cheaper (and made more cheaply) than clothing used to be.
Clothing is treated as cheap and disposable by the vast majority of people I know. Because of this, clothing is made to be cheap and disposable.
Now, if you are talking about comparing a sweater that you made out of a nice wool/alpaca blend and custom fit to your shape, you have to compare it to the sweaters that are similar. You can definitely find $300+ sweaters that are high quality and that’s what you need to compare that hand knit sweater to. The problem is that if someone owns a sweater, it tends to be a $29.99 Target or Penney’s sweater made out of acrylic. You can’t compare that to the hand knit.
Just like when I knit socks and people say that I could buy socks for cheaper. Well, no shit, I can go down to Wallyworld and get a pack of tube socks for a couple of bucks. These socks are neat colors, fit my foot exactly*, made of wool and nylon instead of cotton and elastic and are much more comfy. Good wool socks generally will cost about $15 a pair. That’s what you compare knitted socks to, not bags o’ socks.
You can adjust the width of the heel, length of foot, width of foot, adjust for a high instep, etc.
I agree that good yarn is worth the money, but once the $/yd gets up there, I’ll make hats and scarves and mittens, not sweaters. My limit is ~$100 for a sweater, if I really like it.
One thing to consider about published patterns is that the designer may be getting yarn support from the publisher. The designer could have made the original in Patons or something, and the magazine had the sample knit up with a yarn from their sponsor. I suspect this is an example:
IIRC, that was a baby blanket made out of Koigu. That’s an expensive, sock-weight hand dyed merino wool. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s not superwash, you have to hand wash it or it will felt. So, who was thinking “Hey, I have a couple hundred bucks to blow on some fancy yarn-- I know, I’ll make a baby blanket that you can’t machine wash!”
Dream in Color makes hand dyed machine washable merino wool yarn for ~$25/skein too, but its got twice the yardage of Koigu. I don’t know if I would even use that for something that’s going to get spit up on.
Maybe I should be glad I still haven’t figured out how to knit or crochet.
However, I did just pay $5.19 per skein of hand dyed silk floss for my next cross stitch project. Add the cost of the fabric and the pattern and it ended up running about $90 for the supplies. I stopped myself from buying a pattern book of blackwork, priced at $60. I asked the salesperson if the price was correct, she confirmed it was. The patterns were absolutely gorgeous, though, so it may end up on the Xmas wish list.
I’m also a knitter and tend to pick natural yarns more expensive than I probably should buy… My most expensive sweater ended up costing $250 with an Angora/Mohair/Silk blend.
For years, I’d make a baby blanket for every expecting woman I knew (not just the first time - I’d make a blanket for every baby). I deliberately made them out of machine-wash acrylic. Nice acrylic, mind you, but acrylic. And machine washable. And I’d tell mom-to-be that it was up to rough use and thoroughly machine washable, not delicate at all. One time, the woman (expecting her first) said “why are you telling me this?” All the other experienced mothers (and fathers) in the room said “You’ll be grateful, once you find out…”
Yes I have used several of their yarns and not had that problem, although I have never used Wool of the Andes. I will be avoiding it, thanks for the info. I hate pilly yarn!
Hand-dying undyed wool is a really fun and easy project. All you need is non-machine-washable (feltable) wool, some packets of unsweetened Kool-Aid, and a microwave.
I’ve had good success dying wool with tea and coffee - the longer you “steep” the wool the darker the color (this shouldn’t be surprising). Of course this only results in various shades of brown, but they can be surprisingly rich.
Interesting. I thought only acid dyes bonded with protein fibers (wool, silk, etc) – since tea can be used to dye cotton I assumed it wouldn’t dye wool. Do you add something to make it more acid?
I bet it looks cool. If you have any links to pictures I’d love to see it.
No, sorry, no links - I gave away and in a couple cases actually sold the result,
And, my dear - tea and coffee ARE acidic, naturally. You can experiment with various mordants if you’d like, and different mordants do affect the resulting color and fastness, but wool will take tea or coffee as a dye all by itself.
Nope. It’s permanent, on protein fibers. You do have to rinse out excess, unabsorbed dyes, but once you do that it doesn’t run. It does leave your yarn with a faintly fruity scent!! Here’s how.
You can get fairly saturated color by using lots of powder in proportion to the amount of yarn you have. You can also mix flavors for novel color blends. For example, I mixed Black Cherry with a little Blue Raspberry for a plum-like color.