Since I finished the January crazy-quilted tote for my calendar project I jumped back on making the Iris throw, working this time with Bernat Giggles in Cheerful Blue. From the start this skein seemed determined to give me trouble, not anything cheerful, as I had to contend with a big knot of yarn I tugged out along with the center pull strand (I didn't take a pic of that.)
This yarn is 90% acrylic and 10% nylon, and come in a 3.5 oz. skein. Not sure why they added nylon to the acrylic, perhaps to make it softer. The color is nice, and it's fairly smooth, but it also splits easily and wants to pucker, pop and untwist, especially when you tear out stitches. Naturally I had to tear out two and a half rows to correct two mistakes, which aggravated me because the yarn was untwisting when I went to crochet it again.
To add icing to this terrible cake, I ran out of the yarn on the final row. To keep the symmetry with the other sections I had to pull a compatible color from my stash to finish the section.
There's a subtle color difference between the Giggles and my Red Heart stash yarn, but not enough to annoy me or prove very noticeable.
The head scratcher is amount of yarn that was supposedly in this skein (which I thrifted brand new/unused.) The label says 185 yards, and yet I ran out after eight and a half rows. The Mary Maxim Starlette was only 180 yards, and went the entire distance and left me a couple yards of yarn leftover.
One possible reason is that I'm using a four-row repeat pattern but working nine rows in every color. As in I don't make the same number of repeats for the four different rows each time I switch colors. This time I had to stitch three rows of double crochet stitches in the repeat, and that row eats up a lot more yarn than the other three repeating rows.
The end result was okay. I think the poor start, the problems when ripping out a lot of work and then running out before I finished the section may have aggravated me too much to form an unbiased impression.
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