Tag Archive | shawl yarn

Manos del Uruguay Alma

I have a new shawl to show you, but the point of it is the yarn. A couple of months ago, Fairmount Fibers offered me a skein of the new Manos del Uruguay yarn, Alma, to review. I’m pretty sure you all know how much I love Manos yarns, so you also know I was eager to take this one for a test drive and see if it lived up to my expectations!

Alma is a single ply fingering weight yarn in 100% merino. It’s labeled superwash but they still recommend you hand wash and dry flat. The colors are all named after inspirational attitudes, like Humility, Generosity, Passion, and Sincerity. I chose Resilience to remind myself that I am resilient! Well, that and I liked the colors in the photo. They also designed the colors to pair well together, with complementary solids and multi-colors. Patience would have gone wonderfully with Resilience!

I noticed right away that Alma has the same soft fluffy feel as all the other Manos yarns I’ve used. It’s lightweight and airy, feeling almost puffy like cotton candy. It’s kind of plush, if a light fingering can feel plush. Maybe that’s partly because it’s a single ply? Whatever the reason, I love it. It felt warm and comforting in my fingers, gliding smoothly but not too hot or heavy in my lap as I knit. I chose to knit the Imagine When shawl by Joji Locatelli.

fullsizeoutput_22d7 I chose this pattern because of the best part about Alma: the yardage! It’s a generous 546 yards per 100 grams, which means you have plenty of yarn to make a good-sized single-skein shawl. I knit the pattern with no modifications and ended up with six grams left. Honestly, I love everything about this yarn. It did have one knot in it, but that’s within normal standards, and it washed and blocked beautifully.

fullsizeoutput_22db I’m not completely convinced I chose the right pattern to show off the yarn; I’m wondering if something more stockinette-based would have been better. But this was a fun pattern to knit — I guess I really am learning to appreciate short rows — and I loved having the yardage in one skein for a nice big shawl. The yarn retails for around $30 per skein, which I typically pay anyway for my good yarns, so I’d buy this one in a heartbeat. Especially since I can feel good about buying Manos yarns, which are hand-dyed by artisans and help support families in Uruguay! It’s available in yarn stores now, and you can find the closest one to you here, or find it online now.

Thanks so much to Stitchcraft Marketing and Fairmount Fibers, the North American distributor of Manos del Urugay, who sent me one skein of Alma (retail value: $30) for free. I received no other compensation for this review. All opinions and photos are my own.

What’s that yarn??

Dec13

I’ve had a lot of questions about the new project I shared in an earlier post. I wasn’t thinking clearly, or else I would have included the details of course! Both yarns are from Manos del Uruguay, and they’re my newest review project.

The solid is Fino in the color Peacock Plume, and it’s an extrafine merino/silk blend. I’ve used it once before and it’s heavenly. It’s paired with Cabrito, a laceweight kid mohair blend, in the color Locura Fluo. Now imagine merino, silk, and mohair all in one project, and you know why I’m obsessed with this project right now!

The Cabrito is 230 yards and Fino is 490, but I really wanted to knit them together for maximum coziness. I decided the two held together could be close to a DK, so I chose a simple shawl pattern called Orbit. I’ve made one before and wear it all the time, so I knew it was a good pattern choice. I’ve been tired in the evenings so I’m not getting a ton of knitting done but here’s where I am so far.

This one’s not going to linger on my needles, I can tell already!

Shawl progress

Aug20

I chose poorly. Not the yarn, not the pattern. Both are heavenly. But I’m trying to modify a 5-color shawl to 3 colors and it’s not going as well as I wanted. I’m talking about my Dotted Rays shawl with the gorgeous Zen Yarn Gardens Serenity 20.

Somehow I missed where the pattern suggested approximately 1400 yards for the Large size. I just saw the yardage for the Super Large and thought 1200 yards would be plenty for the Large. (Note to self: read patterns carefully!) So I knit with color A until I had about 40 grams left and did one wedge alternating colors A and B. I didn’t want too much of the cream at the expense of the green and purple, and since I was at wedge 10 of 15, I thought surely I’d have plenty of yarn. But those later wedges get BIG, guys. Long rows, even doing short rows. After one wedge of all green, I’m down to less than 40 grams, which makes me think there’s no way I can make it through the remaining four wedges with just a bit of green and one full skein of yarn left.

There are a lot of options. I could just end it when I run out of yarn, but I really really want the chevrons at the end. I could frog back to where I stopped alternating the cream and green, and add in the rest of the cream. But I’m not sure it’s worth having to frog and reknit. (It’s definitely not.) The best option in my mind is to add another color. Currently, it’s Speckle/Solid/Speckle, so I should be able to end with a coordinating solid purple and it will be perfect. I have a couple of choices in my stash (purple yarn? Of course I do!) but I’m going to wait until I get close to running out of the purple speckle to pick. It might depend on how much I need.

I don’t think I’m a “wing it” kind of knitter. I think I like having all the information to work with up front!