Yarn Testing

How it Began

In May 2022, Memo's Art House (@memo.arthouse on Instagram) put up a tester call for yarn! I had never heard of yarn testing before. I was immediately curious and signed up for every possible yarn in the hopes of being selected for one of them.

The Process

I tested Pink Lemonade, a 100% cotton sports weight yarn.

The gradient of this yarn is created by tying 1 ply out of 6 to a new colour, and slowly introducing more ply of the new colour, until all 6 ply are the new colour. This is great, because if the gradient quantities weren't identical, I could simply cut and rejoin the yarn at the new colour.

I proceeded with disembowling the beautiful yarn cake, to weigh out exactly how much of each colour section I had. Then, I did a (very lazy, very small) swatch to figure out how many grams of yarn it would take. With that, I knew how much fabric I would get out of each colour!

I decided on the Primavera Sweater by Renate Dziedataja for this yarn test. You can also read my full pattern review here.

I used the solid pink section of this yarn for the body and the gradient to green section for the sleeves!

The colour gradient of this yarn is so gorgeous! I had comments that the shirt looked like a Chinese dance costume, or Blake Lively's Met Gala dress.

Yarn Review

Here are my thoughts on the yarn. First, cotton yarn has such beautiful stitch definition for lacework.

Cotton is also perfect for wearables in hot and humid tropical climates. It is durable and does not pill as much as animal fibre. There was no colour bleeding at all with this yarn. Washing this garment was relatively easy!

For a 1200m skein, you could probably make up to a XL sized shirt/sweater. Because the whole skein makes the full shirt, I had barely any ends to weave in and didn't need to attach new balls of yarn along the way! Super convenient.

The yarn is very loosely spun, so it makes a fabric with very lovely drape. However, because it has very light twist, it will split easily with crochet, so I recommend it for knitting.

I would like to thank Memo's Art House for the opportunity to be their yarn tester! I loved the experience of trying out a new yarn and figuring out how I could play to its strengths. Hoping to get to do this again someday.