Genius Tips
Working with Two Yarns
I am utterly enamored with Norah Gaughan’s genius designs in MDK Field Guide No. 28: Renewal.
There’s one aspect I want to highlight: Norah’s yarn choice. Specifically, her choice of two yarns. For both the Bolin Cardigan and the Addams Coatigan, Norah chose two of Rowan’s most-loved yarns, held together: Felted Tweed and Kidsilk Haze.
There are a few patterns out there right now that use two yarns held together like this. Why would a designer do this? How should a knitter work with them?
Felted Tweed is a relatively light, woollen-spun yarn, a little bit rustic-looking. Kid Silk Haze is a deliciously light and fuzzy thing, a relatively fine strand of silk and mohair that’s got a remarkably full halo to it, making it seem much bigger than it is. Not heavier, just bigger.
(When I say “light” here, I’m talking about the yardage-to-weight ratio. There’s a lot of yards in 50 grams of these yarns; you get a lot more yardage per gram than you do with, for example, a yarn that’s pure wool or cotton. Garments made with these yarns don’t weigh a lot.)
I love Felted Tweed on its own, but it’s a smidge on the fine side, meaning that there’s a lot of knitting to make a garment.
A lovely garment fabric, very traditional maybe a bit rustic?
The fiber blend of Kid Silk Haze is incredibly warm and soft, and the fuzzy halo is absolutely glorious, but on it own is not always so good for garments because the fabric it makes is fairly open and unstructured.
KidSilk Haze knits up beautifully, but the fabric is pretty ethereal. I let the top edge of the swatch roll up a little so you can see how much the light comes through.
So why not hold two strands together?! The obvious benefit is that the stitches are larger, so there’s less knitting! But there’s other great reasons to do it, too.
Combining two yarns harnesses the properties of both, brilliantly. Working Felted Tweed and Kidsilk Haze together gives you a more solid (less open) fabric, with extra warmth from the silk and mohair, and with a delicious halo for luxury and softness.
Definitely better than the sum of the parts!
Kid Silk Haze also brings a different type of solidity: if you’re making a garment with a fiber that’s likely to stretch, then using a majority-mohair yarn as a carry-along will impede the stretch.
If you’re making an oversized or long garment (a coatigan, for example!) adding Kidsilk Haze is a smart strategic choice to help it hold its shape and fit you well over time.
Tips
The challenge with using two yarns held together, especially when one is much finer than the other, is to make sure that you keep them together, for each stitch.
Here are a few things that help me:
Use pointy needles, to make sure you catch both strands for each stitch.
Periodically check that you’re holding both yarns together. This might sound a bit silly, but it’s easy to tell when you’ve lost hold of the yarn if you’re working with one; but if you’re working with two, the finer one might just go walkabout without you noticing.
Work a little slower than you might normally, and be a bit more “extravagant” about each stitch, making sure it’s down on the body of the right-hand needle before you pull it off. (This means that you might find yourself needing a smaller needle than expected—that’s ok!)
Inspect the fabric periodically to see if you’ve got any pesky half-dropped stitches. I like to do this before I settle myself onto the couch and press Play for a KnitFlix marathon.
If you do spot a stitch where one of the two strands is loose, you’ve got a couple of choices to fix it.
If you’re not too far away, just ladder down and pick it back up with your crochet hook, making sure to grab both strands.
Or if that ship has sailed, hook a handy removable stitch marker on the spot. Later you can catch the dropped half-stitch on a short length of yarn, bring it through to the back of the fabric and just weave those ends in.
There’s a secret third option, applicable if it’s the mohair strand that’s loose: leave it. Nobody will know.
(Note: If asked by the Knitting Police if I suggested this, I will vehemently deny it.)
Mohair is pretty darn sticky, so it’s difficult to unravel. It’s anchored to the other strand either side and on the row below. Plus, once you’ve washed the thing a couple of times chances are it’s going to be remarkably secure.
If there is a loose loop, I will always pull it through to the wrong side of the fabric so it’s not going to catch on anything.
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Omigod!
There are Knitting Police?
No more cheating on swatches for me!
Thank you for another excellent explanation of how knitting works.
Thank you for this article. I feel like this has been coming up more. I’ve been working with this idea recently as well! Different textures/fibers, colors, and just straight up doubling up can work so nicely.
KnitFlix – I love it! Another great article, thank you!
Good advice!
The big deal for me when I look at two yarn patterns is color. I’m inclined to move on to other patterns because of it. Which two colors of this pricey yarn are going to work together? It is too expensive to try out different swatches to determine the best combo. I appreciate it when designers help out by showing different combos as MDK has done for this Field Guide. Also if you choose to match the weight and gauge of the combo together by choosing a single yarn instead it doesn’t always work out well. The resulting fabric is heavier and denser since a mohair combo fills in the gaps to get the gauge with a light airy fabric. I would just as soon move on to a single yarn pattern where I know if I get gauge I’m able to knit a garment like the one pictured.
The second tip on how to deal with a rogue mohair stitch is brilliant! I’ve done the others; drop down or just leave it but pulling it to the back with a piece of yarn; great idea! Thanks Kate for this and all your clear, helpful writing.
When you say that including majority mohair yarn will keep your fabric from stretching, does that mean that carrying something like KidSilk Haze along with a 100% alpaca yarn will help keep a sweater from stretching? I’ve got a gorgeous sweater quantity of hand dyed alpaca yarn… and experience with an alpaca sweater becoming an oversized alpaca tunic.
Mohair/silk impedes stretch. Whoa. I never considered that aspect before! I’ve seen a lot of patterns recently that include a strand of mohair/silk, and wonder if in ten years we’ll all look at those sweaters and say “yeah, know exactly when that was knitted”. But I love the look!
As usual, great sound advice.
Thanks, Kate!
I love this post! But I have a question about working with 2 strands of yarn held as 1: each time we make a stitch, we put a tiny bit of twist into the working yarn. That’s why it’s good to keep the ball of yarn on the floor: that tiny twist gets distributed along a long length of the working yarn & thus doesn’t matter much. But with 2 strands, 1 gets twisted around the other, whether the yarns are very different in weight or just the same yarn doubled. This happens even when the yarns are kept separate in knitting bowls or the like. Eventually the tension & yardage of the yarns are affected & it’s necessary to stop knitting & untwist the yarns from each other. Is there a way to prevent this extra twisting? (I’m a “thrower”. Would making the stitches differently help?)
Thanks!
For years I’ve been wondering if I could make a garment with stash 100% alpaca by adding something like KSH to it. Maybe I’ll try it. I’d make it in pieces. Or is this wishful thinking?
Thanks for these tips.
Thank you for this article! I’m particularly interested in mohair helping fabric to hold its shape. Sue already asked about using it with alpaca yarn. I wonder the same about superwash yarns.
There are gorgeous superwash yarns I hesitate to use in sweaters because the resulting garment stretches. Margot Chien is especially skilled at choosing a mohair to carry with yarns (often Spincycle Dyed in the Wool, a superwash). I assumed she was after the color, haze and softening, but now I wonder if that is the only goal!
Do you normally use really similar colors when knitting these together? Or not really?
Using unmatched colors of Felted Tweed and KSH can give you a knitted fabric that’s almost iridescent—rather like dupioni silk.
ooh, I love this, thank you Kate! I have a bag of beautiful colors of Kid Silk Haze left over from my Craftsy days (original Craftsy), when they often had awesome giveaways of extra ecomm inventory.
This was very helpful. Your advice about a dropped mohair stitch was so helpful and makes me feel much more assured in knitting with a mohair strand and not be nervous about dropping a stitch. Thank you.
Thank you for this. Over a year ago, I began knitting a long vest with felted tweed and kidsilk haze held together and thought I shouldn’t have chosen the felted tweed as a base because it produced a marled look. But, it’s a pretty color combination. Thanks for the confidence boost. I also appreciate the 2nd and 3rd tips for the dropped mohair stitch!
I have used Brooklyn Tweed Loft together with Kidsilk Haze to knit an Oslo Hat – and I had enough leftover to knit a beret. Both are fantastic hats, windproof and soft. My favorite combination