Welcome to a series of posts about Clean Cotton Big. If you like instant gratification knitting projects, stick around — you’re going to like this!
Clean Cotton Big is made from 85% recycled cotton and 15% recycled polyester. Recycling is good, right? It’s a super bulky tape yarn that is formed by knitting 2 strands of yarn into a loose, 5-stitch i-cord.
Clean Cotton Big comes in solids and “marls” which makes it possible to do easy colorwork.
With 85% cotton, Clean Cotton Big will be absorbent, so it’ll make a great bath mat (if you use a non-slip product under it). It could also make a neat dish-drain cloth for those of you who, like me, don’t have a dishwasher in the house.
The care for Clean Cotton Big is machine wash and tumble dry. Well, that’s easy enough!
It comes in 8 solid and 8 marled colors, and many of the marls coordinate with the solids.
The knitting tension is given per inch. It translates to 6 to 8 stitches and 10-12 rows to 4” [10cm] using size 15-17 [10-12.75mm] needles.
If you’re in a metric country, you’ll likely want to round down, as the metric size nearest US size 17 is 12mm, and the next size (15mm) will no doubt be too big. For my swatches, I ordered smaller needles – I want to make a reasonably dense fabric in a gingham pattern.
What’s gingham? It’s a checked, woven fabric where the warp and weft are threads are situated so that the two colors cross over one another at intervals, creating solid squares of each color separated by squares that have both colors combined. Clean Cotton Big has several solid colors with matching colors made by using one strand of each color in its i-cord. This makes knitting gingham really easy!
My friend Marie took this photo of a piece of gingham fabric. The raw edges show the warp and weft threads. Where the white threads cross blue threads, and vice versa, the two colors are “marled” together like the red and white yarn in the photo above!
Also this week, I get to play with some new-to-me needles – Knitter’s Pride basix, clear birch needles with gold ferrules, and black cables. Come back for my next post, and we’ll put them all together!
Knitter’s Pride basix needles have clear birch tips, gold tone ferrules and a black cable.