Let Down

Because I've never heard of Yarn Bee Aurora Borealis Twist yarn -- and I got this skein of it in a thrifted lot -- I decided to make a one-skein, no pattern envelope style pouch and see how it worked up.

Aurora Borealis Twist seems to be pretty rare now, having been discontinued, and presently retails for about $8.00 to $10.00 per skein when you can find it on Etsy or another reseller platform. There's a clearance sticker on mine that says $4.19 so this was probably pretty pricey when it was in production. I paid about thirty-eight cents for the skein in a bag lot I purchased from a brick and mortar Goodwill in Oxford.

This is a 100% acrylic yarn, with 3.5 oz. and 218 yards (interesting that Yarn Bee did not provide the grams and meters equivalents on their label. That snubs at least half of the global yarn-using community, if not more. Hopefully they've corrected that.) It's labeled as a #4 medium weight and I'd say this is like an Aran, a bit thicker than the standard worsted.

The yarn is a roving style with a very loose twist, but I had no problems working with it. It didn't fray or snag on itself, and it frogged okay. I just went slow with pulling out stitches.

The color of the yarn (Venetian) is a bit prettier in the skein than it is worked up. It just seemed to get very dark as I crocheted. It also has some production blips in the skein that thinned out the yarn about 50%, so the stitches ended up sparse in some areas of my project. Here the regular thickness is to the left, and the thinner portion to the right. I found one factory knot that showed quite a bit and I probably should have cut out and rejoined. I was just too lazy to do it.

It does have a soft hand in the skein, but it works up rather dense and not as soft (I used moss stitch, which is admittedly a dense stitch.) I made the mistake of pulling the bottom row on either side to see what it would do and that stretched it and created a couple of bulges that could probably be resolved with steam blocking, but again, too lazy to do that.

The finished pouch with a brooch closure. These are good for small square gifts like gift cards and such; you just crochet a square using any stitch, turn it on the diagonal and stitch together three points until it looks like an envelope. I noted while whipstitching the square's points into the envelope form how the yarn in my needle just kept getting looser and looser, until it did look like I was sewing with roving, so not the greatest in that department.

I had a small ball of yarn leftover, which I'll likely work into a big beautiful basket in the future.

I didn't mind working with this yarn, but it kept disappointing me. The color, which I thought was so promising, vanished into the work. The production was not the best. The expected softness was not there in the end. I think there are better roving-style yarns out there like Facets by Loops & Threads if you want to work with something like this versus chasing down what's left of a discontinued yarn.