It’s always fun to get to play with the newest yarn on the market. Alpaculence, by Rozetti Yarns is SO new there was only one color available for me to test – and sample – and play!
It’s so new (I hear you: “How new is it?”) that they don’t even have the final draft of the label on the skeins shown on the website! It’s so new, my testing was done on pre-production yarn! (Pre-production yarn is yarn that is in the final stages of development.)
Two balls of Rozetti Alpaculence in the agate colorway. The “white” flecks are actually a 6% glitter content.
When I approach a new yarn, I hold it, almost in a meditative way, and I ask it what it wants to become.
I examine it for its structure, yarn content, tension and other details I’ll want to factor into a project I’d like to make from it.
Here’s what I know about Alpaculence
1. It’s a blended yarn, with 76% acrylic, 9% each wool and alpaca fiber, and 6% glitter. Hmm, glitter. But not a lot of glitter. The alpaca content lends this yarn a nice, soft halo.
2. Alpaculence is a singles yarn, meaning that there is only one ply. Forgive the pun, but I have a bias about singles yarn which I’ll explain a little more in tomorrow’s post. For now, let’s just say there are pros and cons to a singles yarn.
3. Alpaculence is a sock weight yarn, and at 536 yards [490 meters] per 100 gram ball, a single ball of it will go a LONG way.
4. The color sections are long, too. When I look at the end of the ball, I see about 4½ repeats of the four colors (in the case of our agate colorway, brown, green, navy, and red). Being the yarn geek I know I’m, I estimate that each color repeat will have approximately 120yds [109m] and .8oz [23g]. Each color section will have about 30yds [27m] or .19oz [5½g].
5. The yarn is spun with a Z twist, meaning that when you look at the strand of yarn vertically, the fibers all align with the / slant in middle of the letter Z. This is opposed to S twist, where the fibers align with the \ slant in the middle of the letter S. We’ll discuss this in more detail tomorrow, too.
The second thing I do with a brand new yarn is grab the recommended knitting needles and begin a tension swatch. I’ll do that tomorrow, and I’ll also talk more about twist and the pros and cons of a singles yarn as the week progresses. Stay tuned.
This is part 1 of 5 in this series.
Go to part 2: Knitting with single ply yarn: sometimes it comes down to balance