Good old me

I've been worried by some yarns. I have quite some that are definitely good quality. Kirameki, for example, looks pretty in the ball. It's a tape with little loops, silk/viscose blend. The colour is very deep green, so green that in most pictures it shows as totally black. When knitted, it looks awful. If I used smaller needles (I took the 2mm ones only to stretch the sample, I used 4,5mm) , it would look like the same mess, just denser. My theory that tape yarns look better in skeins has another proof, I'm afraid.
Some yarns seems to have an used washrag somewhere in the pedigree. Nagareha, silk/wook/acrylic/whoknowswhat blend, it's soft, nice for the touch and grey with many very colourful blobs. My great-grandma had a sewing box with a clump of various threads that looked like this. I have no idea why she kept it there, maybe it was frugality to n-th degree because even with the help of the saint patron of seamstresses (whoever might that be) nobody could disentangle it. Whoever might be the saint patron of knitting, let me have some inspiration as of what to do with this yarn. I have four grey skeins and four or five in black which looks a bit better, admittedly.
Katorea is from the same period of the Noro company. Maybe some fashion historian who is better-versed in the subject might explain why at a certain point the look of being dipped in a bucket and dragged across the halfway floor was prevalent. It's the time when Noro used ivory tags instead of black ones, should you want details. This nubbly linen yarn with cotton nubbles came out better than I expected which, I'm afraid, doesn't really mean well. I had low expectations. I however find the yarn somewhat charming - but not enough to use those 9 skeins I have for a sweater. I actually have no idea what garment it could make. One row for texture in plain black sweater is my maximum.
Kiku looks like a cord. Knitted, it looks like a washrag again. I'm a proud owner of one skein so I might keep it as a collection item. Very disappointing yarn. It evokes the '80 to me but I'm too young to remember.
The utmost surprise was this yarn. It is pure linen from Yllet, I bought it in Sweden and it was freaking expensive. At least in my terms. It was lying somewhere around neatly packed in a plastic bag and I just didn't know. In the shop where I got it, they had some samples which were beautiful, that's why I got the yarn. It is however linen, people have horrendous stories about it and it's said to be hard and scratchy. I fished out a skein and made a sample. I started with a 1x1 ribbing since I thought that as a plant fibre, it would lack any springiness. The ribbing had very sculptural quality to it, wool behaves diffferently and cotton just hangs in a boring way. I switched to 2x2 ribbing and to my sheer surprise it wasn't the usual flat-on-two-levels ribbing.... it was undulating, creating ridges and abysses. The yarn is sturdy, almost wirey but by no matter hard or scratchy, it's beautiful for the touch and feels sort of waxy and it's glossy.
I don't really like cables. I can make them in many and tangled ways but it's not the mindless knitting that I prefer for various reasons (basically I let the hands knit and my mind is occupied by something totally different). I however couldn't resist. The yarn just shouted for ribbing. I tried this basketweave pattern (okay, there's wrong crossing. It's only a sample, folks) and it came out totally stunning. There's a problem. I have one skein in black, two in grey and two in white, one of which is somewhere and I have no idea where. I could use a heap of each of the colours for a heap of... something. Something possibly cabled.

Now I need to work a bit but tomorrow there'll be something very stupid presented.