My mom recently traveled to Texas to visit my sister and came home with all kinds of gifts. I of course received yarn (never complaining about that!) Each skein was accompanied with a tale of the particular store it came from and a lot of oohing and ahhing on my part. There was one yarn that instantly caught my eye – Universal Yarns Bamboo Bloom. A thick & thin yarn in a cool green color that seemed to be lighter with a bit of sheen in the thin sections, and an almost forest green in the thick roving sections.
To me, thick and thin yarn is this kind of magical unicorn in the yarn world. It is at its most basic just that – yarn that has varying thickness – usually in a more exaggerated way. And while thick & thin are a common denominator, after that the variations are endless. I have seen very thin plied yarn turning into fluffy roving, yards of chunky merino followed by a few almost thread-like yards and ones that transition from thick to thin so subtly you don’t even realize it. I could really go on and on. So like the unicorn – I love the idea of it and I know I want it but what the heck do I do with it once I have it?
I decided to just kind of wing it.
The color and variation were so cool on their own that I could just let the yarn be the focus. I also wanted to make sure that I showcased the two distinct thicknesses by giving them their own different stitch. I decided on a simple knit cowl in the round.
Knitting the Cowl
Since I wanted both textures to have their time to shine I decided to knit the thinner sections with a standard knit stitch and the thicker sections with a ‘knit through the back loop’. These stitches were worked on the yarn as I came to it on the left needle instead of the working yarn in my right hand. Knitting through the back loop created a little twist in the stitch that is being worked – in this case the thick sections of yarn.
I was simply knitting around until I came to a thick(er) section of stitches on the left needle. I then started knitting through the back loop until the section of stitches thinned out. I didn’t follow any hard fast rules on what was considered thick or thin – pretty much whatever I felt like in that section.
Originally I started with 100 stitches and proceeded to knit round and round. After a few inches, I realized that the natural curl of the yarn combined with the extreme thick and thin made the bottom inch or so look fairly uneven and much larger than the main section.
Sooo.. I decided to rip it out and start again.
This time I cast on 80% of my stitches (80), knit one row, and then added the extra 20% (20) by doing a knit front and back every 4th stitch. This really helped with the size of the curl.
One skein made the cowl approx 7 inches tall. I had two balls of yarn so i decided to just make an extra long cowl. When I was down to a few rows I considered decreasing the 20% of stitches, but because binding off tends to be tighter than casting on I did not need to. I simply finished with a standard bind off.
The finished cowl ended up being almost 15 inches long with the curl. The yarn was so light and squishy though that it made the perfect draped cowl for me.
In the end
What I learned in this experiment is that Thick & Thin yarn is a great way to knit or crochet when you want to throw the rules out the window and get creative. Time to dig out the other skeins of thick & thin in my stash and start creating.. 💗
