Yarn Discovery

While digging for yarn yesterday, I came across this yarn.

It’s Madelinetosh Longrider and the color is Doe Eyes. Madelinetosh has traditionally been one of my favorite yarns but it aggravates me that they will not put weight on their skeins or on the Ravelry listings. My skeins say 220 yards. The Ravelry listing says 250 yards.

I can weigh my skein but without knowing what it’s supposed to weigh, I still won’t have an idea of how many yards I have. I can weigh the whole skein, then measure off 10 or 20 yards, weigh that, and calculate the yardage but why can’t they just put the weight on the skeins like most other yarn dyers? I suppose it’s their right to do whatever they want to do but it makes it too hard to compare yarns to yarns not knowing the weight so, I’m pretty much done with Madelinetosh.

Anyway . . before my rant . . I want to make “All of the Lights“. I bought the yarn shown below but it may be darker than I wan’t. I actually love the sweater enough that I would make a light one and a dark one. The yarn below is worsted weight.

The Madelinetosh yarn is 75% merino/25% nylon. The WSK yarn shown below is 100% wool. The Madelinetosh is DK weight, which the pattern calls for. The WSK is worsted weight but may work out better because the sizes of the pattern are kinda in between what I want to make.

The Madelinetosh yarn has a gauge of 20 – 22 stitches/4″ with 4.0 to 4.5 mm needles. The WSK has no listing for gauge (weird) but ESK lists it at 4.5 – 5.5 stitches (or 18 – 22 stitches) on 3.5 – 4.5 mm needles.

This means the WSK yarn (worsted weight) weighs .538 grams per yard. If there’s 220 yards on the Madelinetosh, it weighs .582 grams per yard, which makes the DK weight yarn weigh more than the worsted weight yarn which shouldn’t be accurate. But, if the Madelinetosh yarn has 250 yards on the skein, then each yard would weigh .512 grams, which makes it less than the worsted weight which would make sense. See how important it is to have the weight on the band?

I have enough yardage of both to make the sweater. I will swatch, and see how the cables look in both yarns. Assuming I have 220 yards per skein on the Madelinetosh, then I have 1,760 yards. The pattern calls for 1,687 yards. That would be cutting it a little close but I do plan to make my sweater a bit shorter and I doubt I will add the pockets.

I have plenty of the WSK yarn. Soon, I hope you share swatches!