- When you fall in to the rhythm of understanding
what you're doing and why,
you can allow your brain to relax and just
soak in the therapeutic, repetitive
steps and motions of knitting.
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When you approach yarn and the fiber world in general,
there's a ton of different ways that yarn can be made,
a ton of different colors that it can come in,
a ton of different sizes.
So to be able to cohesively speak to each other about yarn,
there are a couple of different systems that we use
to understand what you're saying
and what you're looking for.
When we talk about yarn, primarily you'll think about
one, what fiber you want to use,
whether that's a plant, animal, or synthetic fiber.
Those are the three main categories of yarn.
They have each different characteristics
and what they're good for.
When you want a little bit of breathability,
you can have structure with plant fibers,
but you can also have a lot of drape.
So when I say drape, think, my sweater is really flowy
and I want it to be able to hang nicely
and not feel like I'm wearing a cardboard suit.
Then we move over to animal fibers,
and those are really warm.
They have a lot of elasticity, and something you'll hear
that I refer to with animal fibers is memory.
So if your item stretches,
you can have the ability for it to snap back
in to its original shape.
The last category is called synthetics,
and those are man-made fibers.
The most popular tends to be acrylic.
You have other things like polyester,
and those items are great for when you want something
to launder in both the washing machine and the dryer.
So those have easy care.
Moving on to our weights of yarn,
when we talk about weights,
I'm not talking about how heavy your yarn feels,
but the thinness or thickness of your strand of yarn.
You have your number one fingering weight yarn.
You'll hear this sometimes be referred to as
sock weight yarn.
That means that this would be a nice weight of yarn
for socks to be made in.
And this will be a really warm sock,
even though the yarn is very slim.
Moving up, we have sport weight yarn.
That is referred to as your number two weight yarns.
These are great for baby items like sweaters and blankets.
Next up we have our DK weight yarns.
So it's not so thick that it's super warm,
but it's not so slim that it takes forever to make.
So this is your DK weight yarn. That's a number three.
From here, we have worsted weight yarn.
Worsted weight, your number four, medium weight yarn.
Moving on up, we have our bulky number five.
So these are a little bit bigger than your worsted weights.
And these, after working with the worsted weight,
you'll feel like you're flying.
Finally, we have our number six, super bulky.
In this yarn, we have multiple,
I'm going to unfurrow this strand,
and we have multiple smaller strands of yarn
that compose this one final diameter of worsted weight.
So this worsted weight yarn is made up of four smaller
plies of yarn, and that's P-L-Y.
The more plies you have,
the more round and clean your strand tends to be.
So as a beginner, I'd recommend
that you stray away from single ply yarns
and work with a four or more plied yarn.
The main things that I want you to notice
when we speak about colorways
is that we have things that feel more solid,
like this orange.
This is a semi-solid hand dyed yarn.
It looks, for the most part, very orange.
Next up, we have our tonals.
Here, these look pretty similar to our semi-solid colorways,
but you'll note that we have
very, very intentional differences in our purples.
So we have a super deep purple
and a super light area of purple.
And so this tonal yarn will produce some really nice
depth in your fabric, similar to my sweater,
how you can see, like there's a little bit of a
deeper golden yellow in some places
and a brighter golden yellow.
So same with this green, you'll have areas of
very, very light or muted green,
and then you'll have more rich, deep green.
And these are your tonal colorways.
The two things that I want you to note here are speckles.
So we have four kinds of speckled yarns.
This super bulky yarn feels much more heavily speckled,
So the speckles are spreading a little bit,
and they're really, really big, covering the yarn.
On our creamy yarn, you can notice that
we have a more minimal speckle,
where the blues and the reds are really crisp,
and they're very small, and they'll produce
a really fun texture to your fabric.
The last two specialty things that I want to talk about are
your stellinas, which provides the shimmer,
so you'll notice that we have a shimmery yarn here,
and you can see those little, little bits of metallic.
The last thing here is a yarn that is super bulky,
and this is called a tweed.
So you'll see little nips of cream and dark charcoal
just applied in to our fabric.
And that gives that really, really nice
earthy, oatmealy feel to your yarn.
The last thing you need to know when working with yarn
of any kind is that some yarns need to be wound
in to a ball or cake of yarn
before you start working with them.
And some yarns, you can just go ahead
and start knitting directly from.
So when you purchase yarn from a big box store,
those yarns generally come in this skein shape,
and you can just pull a yarn strand
from the center of your ball,
and you can start to work from the center.
However, when you purchase hand dyed yarn
or yarn that's from a local yarn shop,
which we love supporting small business,
so those come in this shape.
So when you go to the yarn shop,
ask them if they can wind your yarn in to a cake,
which looks sort of like this.
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- [Narrator] Thanks for watching.
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