Loopgram: Hooking with cotton yarn

In my yarn panel for my alternative fabrics rug, Got Wool?, I used a yellow cotton yarn I picked up from a local yarn shop called "Knitting in the Loop." I needed a particular yellow, and the only non-wool yarn I could find to use was cotton. It is very different from acrylic yarn so I am giving it a separate evaluation.

Cutting ease: on a scale from 1 to 5 with "1" being "Cuts like butter; easy as wool" and five being "So terrible don't bother," cotton yarn gets a "0" since all you have to do is snip off the end and start hooking. Just as a note, if you buy yarn that is not balled yet, be sure to ask the retailer to take the skein and ball it for you. It makes hooking the yarn easier than trying to deal with a skein getting tangled up or trying to ball it yourself. Retailers will have a little winding machine that should ball it quickly. I'm not sure about the technical term for this since I'm not a knitter and rarely deal with yarn but the point is, you don't want to hook from a skein that is knotted and will tangle up. You need to have a ball of yarn to pull from.

Hooking ease: on a scale from 1 to 5 with one being "Hooks like a dream; easy as wool" and five being "Why am I trying this?", cotton yarn gets a "3". Cotton yarn is a bit stiff so you have to work with it a bit to get the loops to sit the right height. The cotton yarn I used was variegated in width, and this made it a little more tricky because the really thin areas of the yarn didn't want to stay tall and put. In one area of my rug (pictured to the left) I doubled the cotton yarn as a hooked. In another area of my rug where I am hooking all the alternative fabrics together (and wow is this fun! but more on that in another post on another day) I am using only one strand. The one strand is a bit harder to keep even loops, but I think this is because the width of the yarn is variegated.

Overall look: on a scale from 1 to 5 where one is "gorgeous like hand-dyed wool" to "bad look even for a bad hair day", cotton yarn gets a "3". I'm not sure how much I like the look of cotton yarn. It is stiff in appearance, and the loops are really visible. It reminds me of cotton string - which I guess it is in some respect - although it puffs out a bit more than string when it is hooked because it is not as tightly wound as cotton fibers that make up string. I liked the fact that I could get really thin lines if I wanted them, and the cotton yarns I found at the yarn shop had a good range of color choices. I imagine if I really looked, I could find plain cotton yarn and dye it myself. But I would really have to want the stiff string look to go to that much trouble, especially when I have gorgeous wools in my hooking closet.

Average evaluation: 1.2 out of 5: "Not bad hooking, but it's string"

Loopgram: Hooking with acrylic yarn

One of the eight possibilities for the alternative fabrics category of the Rug Hooking Merit Program is to hook a 100 square inch mat in yarn. So for one of my panels in my alternative fabrics rug, Got Wool?, I chose to hook acrylic yarn, since I am reserving real wool for another area of my rug. Here is my evaluation.

Cutting ease: on a scale from 1 to 5 with "1" being "Cuts like butter; easy as wool" and five being "So terrible don't bother," acrylic yarn gets a "0." Why? What could be easier! Just find the end and start hooking. If the yarn is narrow, it might require a double thread. But there is no tearing, no fabric raveling, no wool dust, nothing. It's great.

Hooking ease: on a scale from 1 to 5 with one being "Hooks like a dream; easy as wool" and five being "Why am I trying this?", acrylic yarn gets a "3". There are a couple of snags, literally. The acrylic yarn can snag so you have to be a little more careful with the hook. Really thick yarn is a dream to hook and just one strand will do. Thinner yarn is impossible to hook as a single thread. It just slips right back out. So you have to work with a double thread which is tricky until you get used to twisting the two threads on the hook and not allowing one of them to pull back out of the linen when you pull the next loop. You also have to be aware of the direction of your hooking, much more so than with wool. With thick acrylic yarn, it matters that you hook all the loops exactly the same - in the same direction and with the same twist. If you don't the hooking ends up looking messy - all over the place. I ended up pulling out the black background and rehooking in straight lines because of this.

Overall look: on a scale from 1 to 5 where one is "gorgeous like hand-dyed wool" to "bad look even for a bad hair day", acrylic yarn gets a "2". I like the look every much, but missed the ability to be able to control my colors via dyeing. It was difficult and expensive trying to find yarns in the color ranges that I wanted, even when I went to a fine yarn store. Now this would be remedied with wool yarn which I could easily control. But this is not an evaluation of wool yarns, but acrylic.

Average evaluation: 1.7 out of 5: "Pretty darn good but not quite wool"

Eyelash yarn

Some of you were interested in what yarn I used for the crow in my previous post. This is what it looks like. I don't have the label anymore, but I bought it at Michael's. I think it is called eyelash yarn.

Loopgram: Hooking with eyelash yarn

Scare-Jack has two crows flying to his shoulders. Since I want Scare-Jack to be an example of how we can embellish and hook with alternative materials, I decided to try to hook the crows with a fuzzy threaded yarn I picked up from Michael's. It was terrible to work with, very slippery, even doubled it wouldn't stay in place once hooked. What to do?

I hooked the birds with wool first, leaving small gaps between the rows. Then I went back in with the yarn, double-strands, and hooked loops a twice as high as I had hooked the wool in the tiny ditches between the wool strands. This secured the yarn so that it doesn't slip out of the foundation. I think the results are very stunning.

"I love chocolate"

The chocolate kisses pocket pack mat is coming along. Worked on it last night and added some rose details to the edges since the design was feeling incomplete. I am liking the embellishment that this metallic yarn is giving the elements. I am going to go back to Michael's today and pick up some different yarns to experiment in other pocket pack mats. Hum...the possibilities!

Loopgram: Hooking with yarn

My sister and her family will be coming to Texas in mid-July to visit us. I have two nieces about my son's age, and when they saw his Woof backpack on this blog, they wanted one too. I am going to try hooking them "Pocket Packs" - 10 by 10 mats to attach to small purse-like packs I will sew.

So each of my nieces has told me her desired design. One a frog with a dragonfly, the other a chocolate kiss which, she said, I can hook white if I don't have silver wool.

Now I have gray, but gray isn't silver. So what to do? I went to a specialty yarn shop thinking metallic yarn. They had none. So over to Michael's where yes! they have metallic yarn.

I have never hooked with yarn before, and after working with it last night, I have a new appreciation for all hookers who use it as their primary wool-of-choice. Yikes it is tricky to use. I found it too thin, and easily pulled out each time I tried to ply a new loop. When I tried hooking one row after another consecutively two strands apart, it was impossible to see what I was doing and the yarn flattened out and was very hard to deal with.

So this is what I found with some experimentation. First I used two strands of yarn at the same time, twisting them onto the hook as I pulled it through the backing. I hooked one row across, another row about three fibers away from the first, then back across between the two rows I had already hooked. Hooking in this trench helped me be able to keep my loops high enough and it was easier to see what I was doing. I don't know if it shows well in this picture, but there is a metallic thread running through the yarn and it makes the hooking sparkle like foil on a chocolate kiss.