What kind of “knitted yarn” are you talking about? Both wool and polyester are yarns that can be knitted to make sweaters. Polyester is a lousy yarn for knitting: the fabric knitted from it is not warm in cold weather, and in warmer weather, it quickly becomes sweaty and damp. Like its synthetic counterparts, it is dirt cheap, which is why virtually every cheap sweater you see in the shops is made of some kind of man-made fibre.
I’d suggest you join Ravelry, and spend 6 months or so in the Yarns section, studying all the different fibres, constructions, weights, blends, and drafting methods and how these influence each yarn’s qualities, dyeability, fulling/growth, draping, etc., etc. Spend some time learning from others on the Yarn and Fibre Forum, even ask a few questions. Discover and follow Rav yarnies like Clara Parkes. Take in a handspinning class. KNIT SOMETHING.
Rams carry marking devices in rutting season. The coloured sheep are the ewes that have been serviced by the ram. If you have more than one ram running with the flock, you might give each ram a different colour, to help distinguish which ewes are in lamb to each ram.
It’s a ram-diddling-ewe-dye-ID-little-lamb-doodah.
Synthetic yarn (NB: NOT ‘wool’) is sometimes cheaper, and some people with allergies to wool or lanolin find it safer to wear next to the skin. Vegans also tend to prefer it.
There are two basic types of synthetic yarn: petroleum-based, such as acrylic or nylon, and plant-based, such as rayon or cellulose.
Petroleum-based yarns, as you might imagine, are not eco-friendly or renewable. They are often flammable if not treated with kemikalzzzz, melting onto your skin. Every time they are washed, they lose tiny microfibres which make their way into the oceans, just like those banned micro-beads in cleansers. Plus, being basically plastic, they degrade like plastic bags: good news for archaeologists, not so good for the environment.
Plant-based fibres will bio-degrade, but the process of creating them can be polluting. For most, the process involves blending the plant material into slush and extruding a thin fibre from that slush, which uses electricity. The process also involves the dreaded kemikalzzz, some of which are genuinely nasty. There’s also significant waste which needs to be dealt with, preferably not by dumping it in a nearby river, which does happen too.
Other, more ‘natural’ plant fibres are not much better. Cotton is famously bad for the environment, both in the growing and the processing. Linen requires the flax plant to be rotted under water for a period of time, then washed repeatedly to extract the phloem (IIRC: it might be xylem, or both). On my family farm, there is a stream-fed pond we call the linsteep, where my ancestors performed this task. It’s now an amusement park for our ducks, and a handy watering-hole for our cattle, but when it was in use, we – and our down-stream neighbours – had to drive our animals to other water sources. The process for making hemp yarn was similar.
Wool is renewable, bio-degradable, non-flammable, need not use the genuinely nastier chemicals in processing (check out the suint method – the residue can be used as a natural fertiliser, which apparently works wonders on tomatoes), all while the sheep mows and fertilises your lawn, provides milk which can be made into ice cream, lanolin for your beauty products, and in the end cuddly sheepskins and yummy meat. Plus, wool is warmer, waterproof, dyes easily with no more than food colouring and vinegar, and when you’re bored with your sweater, you can felt it into pot-holders or cushion covers, or cut it up without unravelling to patch other clothes or make new ones:
Not hard at all. The only thing you need is the right kind of pet.
So goldfish and budgies are right out.
The best pets are the fluffy ones – the ones that grow a decent undercoat in winter. Huskies are good, and so are long-hair cats like Maine Coons. Also, Angora bunnies, and some lionheads, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some guinea pigs and ferrets didn’t produce small, usable amounts of undercoat.
The fluff can be collected through normal grooming. Keep it in a clean, sealable plastic bag until you have enough. When you have about 100g/4oz, you can try removing the hairs from the fluff, wash (if you don’t like spinning “in the grease”) and card, and spin.
This first spinning effort will tell you whether the fluff is worth spinning on its own – some of it may be too short – or whether you’d be better combining it with a longer fibre, like wool or cotton.
Here’s some people who made clothing from their dogs’ hair:
Angora bunnies produce Angora wool, that fluffy, soft stuff that makes gorgeous, expensive sweaters, so that’s pretty mainstream and commercial. However, here’s a video of a woman who keeps Angora rabbits (and poodles), showing the process of producing items from bunny to needle, which would be the same for any other animal fibre:
Sheep, not sheeps. It’s one of those weird English words that doesn’t take a ‘s’ when plural.
Technically, yes-ish. Wool is a winter undercoat which, in primitive sheep, is shed in spring. Most modern sheep have been bred to not shed their wool, although the genes do still exist in commercial breeds and one can often see sheep looking a bit ragged at this time of year, with clumps of wool coming away from their summer coat.
Not all sheep grow wool, and other members of the Caprinae family, such as Cashmere and Angora goats, do. Indeed, the undercoat of Angora goats, mohair, is so routinely sold as ‘wool’ – particularly in suits – that there’s no point in differentiating it now.
Confusingly, Angora rabbits, source of Angora fibre, not only have the name of the goat that does produce wool which is called mohair, but were originally known as wooled rabbits. (It’s also possible to spin Angora cat hair, but enough already).
So, there’s no reason why the undercoat of other animals cannot be called wool, too. However, in practice, these other fibres tend to take the name of the animal it comes from: alpaca, llama, guanaco, vicuna, camel, yak, bison, chinchilla, mink, possum. And finally, qivuit, from the musk-ox.
But if the fibre is from a plant, like cotton or linen, or is synthetic such as nylon or polyester, it is NOT wool, and I will get very sharp with you if you call it wool.
These yarns are usually called thick-and-thin yarns, or occasionally slubby yarns, though the latter usually means the yarn is largely of one thickness with frequent, irregular ‘bobbly’ bits.
Thick-and-thin yarns come in various weights from thread to super-bulky. You can knit any pattern that uses the same weight and gauge as your thick-and-thin yarn. This is because you will be using the appropriate size of needle. The ‘thin’ bits might look a little lacey, or the ‘thick’ bits may look bunched up, but your fabric will even itself out over all.
Thick-and-thin yarns are particularly good at injecting life and movement into otherwise dull and plain knitting. They transform boring stretches of stockinette or garter stitch into an interesting-looking fabric. Some people love the rustic, homespun, home-made look they give to otherwise ordinary garments, and they certainly liven up a basic scarf or cowl. They’re also much loved by independent hand-dyers for their more exotic variegated dyes, so you may well have a virtually unique item at the end of your knitting.
Most of my tricks depend on one thing: taking the yarn from the centre of the ball, instead of the outside –
Admittedly, sometimes it takes a bit more fishing about than this video shows. However, using the yarn from the centre-out means the ball stays in one place and isn’t bouncing around the floor.
So, we have our wool sitting nicely, in one place, not gathering dirt and cat-hair.
Most of my colourwork is in the Fair Isle vein: 2 colours in each row/round. For this, I hold one yarn in my right hand, and the other yarn in my left hand – usually the dominant colour in my right hand as I am a British-style knitter:
This allows me to keep one ball on my left-hand side, and the other on my right-hand side – so they can’t get twisted up.
On the rare occasions where I use more than 2 colours per row/round, I have a few different techniques.
if the 3 (or more) colours are used in roughly equal amounts and/or regularly across the row/round, I usually just work across/around with 2, using the two-handed technique above, and slipping the stitches to be worked in the other colours; then, I work the other colour(s) across/around, slipping the stitches in the first two.
if the colours are not very equally or regularly used across/around, then I use a knitting thimble.
Prym knitting thimble.
if I’m using a lot of colours in very irregular amounts, it’s usually intarsia or ‘picture’ knitting. Then, I wind a metre or so of each colour onto a yarn bobbin, which can hang at the back of the work wherever that colour is needed:
I do not like the knitting thimble as I’m a fairly tight knitter and find Continental knitting (yarn in the left hand) lends itself to lots of annoying dropped stitches, but needs must. I have been known to combine techniques, e.g., two-handed knitting with a thimble when working with one dominant colour (right hand) and 2 or more non-dominant colours (left hand).
You can use these yarns for arm-knitting too, but that’s a different topic.
You can, of course, use these huge needles with finer yarns: it produces a lacier effect. Here’s a video showing how to knit your own hammock, suspended on giant needles:
The other main form of extreme knitting is multi-strand knitting. In this, multiple balls, skeins, hanks of yarn are worked together as one – again on the giant needles. Here’s Rachel John knitting a mattress with 1,000 yarns on a pair of sharpened trees:
A third form of extreme knitting gets very little press. Extreme miniature knitting:
The image above is an Aran vest by Althea Crome, the designer for the movie Coraline. She produces 1:12 miniatures on 0.25mm diameter steel pins, using fine silk embroidery thread at around 3 stitches to the millimetre (80 sts/inch)!! OR LESS!!!
It was their fluffy winter undercoat, and, come spring, it gradually fell out – if you have cats or dogs, you’ll see this exact process happening all over your sofa and best outfits.
There is evidence that sheep were domesticated 9-11,000 years ago, and that they were being bred specifically for their wool 6,000 years ago in Iran. NB: this is what we have evidence for – sheep may have been domesticated and bred for wool earlier, but we don’t have evidence for that.
Primitive sheep still retain their ability to cast their fleece:
It’s possible to reverse shrinking, to a certain extent. The type of garment shrunk matters, as does the degree of shrinkage. The garment is, however, unlikely to recover to its former glory. The simpler the garment, the better the outcome: for example, a scarf or shawl will stretch out better than a glove or jumper. In general, it’s not worth trying this on baby garments: put them on one of the baby’s dolls or teddies instead.
The technique involves wetting the garment thoroughly and stretching it. You’ll need a lot of muscle power to do the stretching – you are, after all, tearing the bonds between the fibres that have snagged together. The garment should be pinned out at its maximum dimensions and be allowed to dry naturally. It’s sometimes possible to repeat this procedure for improved results, but the downside is that the fibres will weaken, and you may tear holes in it.
If this fails, you could gift it to someone whom it will fit! Alternatively, it could be cut up for use as placemats, cushions, or even blankets.
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