Introducing a soft 100% worsted weight cotton yarn

For the last few weeks I’ve been swatching and designing with Cotton Supreme, a yarn by Universal Yarn Inc. that’s 100% soft cotton. I’ll be sharing some insights on this yarn and a few ideas for items that you could knit with this squishy cotton yarn.

This yarn comes in hanks of 100g that you’ll need to wind into balls at home to knit with it. Cotton Supreme is a worsted weight yarn or Medium #4 according to the Craft Yarn Council. Each hank has approximately 180 yards [165 meters]. There are no other fiber types blended with this yarn, so it retains cotton’s best characteristics for knitting: strength, endurance, and drape. Cotton supreme is not mercerized so it has low to no sheen. It also has almost zero elasticity, which also means that it won’t shrink.

If you study the picture above, you’ll see that Cotton Supreme is constructed of 4 singles plies that each have a light twist. There’s a twist factor of 2.5 twists per inch when all 4 plies are spun together with an S-twist. This structure is very sturdy and I couldn’t break the yarn by hand because it was too strong.

I knit these two stockinette swatches with US7 [4.5mm] needles and got a gauge of 4.25 sts per inch, very close to the label’s recommended 20 sts per 4″ on US7 – 8 [4.5 – 5.5mm] needles. The left swatch above is hot off the needles. The one on the right has been through 2 loads of laundry with the hottest water setting and in the dryer as well. The gauge did not change one bit, not even the row gauge, which sometimes happens with cotton. The washing did cause the short ends of cotton fibers to poke out a bit, which gave the fabric a lovely soft bloom. You can see the bloom in the picture of the untwisted yarn above as well.

Cotton Supreme comes in 48 solids, 24 multi-colored varieties that are spaced-dyed, 9 solids with round sequins, and 8 solids with shaped sequins. There’s also another version of tonal spatter-dyed Cotton Supreme called Splash that comes in 7 colorways.

Cotton Supreme DK is also available with 230 yards per 100g and in 24 solid colors.

The resulting fabric made of Cotton Supreme is soft, pliable, and has a lovely feel. And although I would make a dishcloth or two from remnants of this yarn, it’s so much nicer than your typical kitchen cotton variety. It would be lovely as a washcloth for a gift set with some nice handmade soap. More importantly to those allergic to animal fibers, Cotton Supreme is lovely for garments, and I even made a baby sweater out of it, but I share more about this later this week, stay tuned.

I knit these swatches with metal needles, so the stitches slipped back and forth easily without resisting. My bamboo needles are so old (more than 20 years) that they have a patina on them that is kind of gross, so I don’t knit with them much any more, but I tried briefly with them and really didn’t like how sticky they were for this yarn, so I quickly went back to metal. In the above swatch, you can see the slight fuzz that formed after washing it. Even though over all this yarn has no sheen, the little that it has from how the yarn is spun is still visible through the fuzz, which to me shows it’s a quality cotton staple that is used from the onset.

In the next few days, I’ll share some projects I made with this yarn and give you a few ideas of what else you could make with Cotton Supreme.