Knit for Brains

You hear a lot of people talking about using Cascade 220 superwash wool. It comes in a lot of colors, is relatively affordable.

But that’s all there is to recommend it. It’s very blah yarn. The wonderful, natural wool characteristics have been ripped from these sad fibers and what you have is lifeless, convenient yarn.

I bought three balls of slightly deep red Cascade 220 when I first got into knitting a year or two ago. I was going to make myself a neat scarf. I like red, and this seemed like a logical choice for yarn. It was recommended by my LYS proprietor. I have tried to use it on three projects so far but it’s crappy.

I’m working on a lace scarf for my niece using it. I have recently become amused by the way the holes and pattern open up as you knit lace, and thought this would be a fun experiment and a way to use up this red yarn. But as I use it I am realizing that this is overrated yarn. Along with being eroded and lifeless, it looks very dull, and on top of that I find that the dye doesn’t fully penetrate they strands in all places. Probably does for 99.5 percent, but I find here and there that some inside fibers that are lighter or even white.

For texture I liken it to the Peaches and Cream brand cotton yarn I used for some other projects. It is very “soft” but not like alpaca, which is NICE soft. This is soft because it has been stripped of most of its natural wool characteristics. I’m also somewhat intuitive and the vibe I get from this superwash is like the difference of vibe between bleached cotton and unbleached cotton. The natural-state fibers are so much more alive.

The superwash process creates a wool yarn you can theoretically put in the washer without it fulling. It does this by chemically removing or coating over the scales on the wool fibers so they can’t catch on each other and tangle. The fibers in Cascade 220 are clearly eroded and thinner. They are softer because they are thinner, and thus feel rather lifeless for wool. The tactile sense is important to me for fibers as that is the spirit and heart of the sensory experience of a fabric.

As I mentioned in another post, I am phasing out all synthetic yarns, and now any superwash – which I will be calling “superdead”. Cascade 220 is for me the overcooked vegetables of the yarn world. Eventually I will get away from synthetic dyes and maybe even dye my own with natural substances. I really like single ply yarn as it look so old fashioned. To me that is real yarn.

Related Posts:

• Solving Knitter’s Block: When Nothing Will Let You Knit It.
• Recycling Yarn Not the Treasure Hunt I’d Hoped (Part 1)
• How to Rev Up Your Knitting Again
• Is This Wool? How to Test Before You Knit