Red Heart Boutique yarns from Twilight to Infinity!

This week I’m test-driving two Red Heart Boutique yarns: Infinity and Twilight. At first glance they look very similar, but after working with them I realized they were very different. The fiber content and construction are diverse but they both have the metallic strand running through them, which gives them a similar visual appeal. I really liked both of these yarns and they cover a great deal of different project requirements between the two of them.

Twilight and Infinity are both thicker yarns, which I’m not that used to. I find the more I knit, the smaller my yarn becomes. When I started knitting with the Twilight yarn I was unused to using the huge needles; they felt a little ungainly in my hands. After a few rows I got the hang of it and I felt like less of a knitting clutz. The other side to that coin is everything knits up very fast. The last time I worked with yarn this thick I was making a king size afghan and, trust me, there is no way you can make that seem fast.

The first yarn I tried was Twilight. It has a webbing construction, so the entire skein is actually one long tube. I think this gives it a lot of extra spring and makes the knitted fabric very squishable. One thing I’ll advise is to be careful with sharp needles. I kept poking the tip of my needle through areas I wasn’t supposed to. I would say I was splitting the yarn, but the web-like construction doesn’t let the yarn become ‘split’ per-say, you just snag a small piece which makes it impossible to pull your current stitch through. Just as an FYI to those who love sharp needles, you may need to use a little more care.

The fiber content of this yarn is all synthetic, so you have the really easy washing instructions; 61% Acrylic, 25% Nylon, 9% Polyester and 5% Metallic. The webbing construction gives a little bit more stitch definition so solid colors would look really good in a cable or lace stitch pattern. Knitting with the variegated colors I would use a moss stitch or something a little more subtle. With the multiple colors, metallic and texture of the yarn you would want to keep your patterns modest. The solid colors are tonal, so they are all the same color, but lighter and darker in random patterns. Excellent for your more ambitious stitch patterns.

Red Heart’s Boutique Infinity is a really, truly beautiful yarn. The colors are a degrading color shift, so it isn’t just a solid color. I didn’t really notice this at first, but a friend of mine came over and was looking at one of the samples I was knitting and absolutely loved it! At that point I took a mental step back and realized just how lovely this yarn actually is.

There’s a little bit of sparkle, but put together with the tonal color of the yarn it gives a really classy effect.

I’ll say that the Infinity yarn fiber blend is really interesting; 69% Acrylic, 11% Wool, 10% Polyester, 6% Nylon and 4% Metallic. Although there’s only 11% wool, the fiber likes to stick together. I made a mistake and had to rip out a row. I had to be very delicate because the yarn isn’t tightly spun and the stitches wanted to stay right where they were. This also means it’ll be amazingly warm. Those fibers that reach out to one another will block small gaps in your gauge.

For Boutique Infinity yarn, I would suggest projects of winter woolens with a plain stitch pattern. The metallic and long color shift means this yarn has a lot going on to begin with, if you add cables or a complicated stitch pattern to this yarn it would not do them justice. Plain hats, mittens, scarves etc would do very well in this yarn.

These two yarns look similar, but are very different and lend themselves well to different types of projects. There’s some overlap in the mid-ground, but between these two yarns, all your bulky winter knitting requirements will be met, from Twilight to Infinity!