Llearning with Llamas: Working with cotton yarn

Let’s Talk About Cotton Yarn

Jac recently reintroduced our cotton yarn, after it spent a few seasons in the yarn vault*. Cotton yarn is a great choice for heavy wear projects like socks. I love a wool sock, but I want to wear handmade socks in summer as well as winter without cooking my feet. Cotton yarn holds up beautifully in a washing machine, and can take a lot of abuse being stuffed inside shoes.

When working with cotton, you have to approach it as what it is:

A completely different medium than wool yarn.

This is especially evident in gauge, drape, and ends. Today we’re going to focus on how to manage those ends. I’ve moved book club from Wednesdays to Fridays, and I’ll cover cotton gauge and drape this Friday when I introduce my next book club knit-along: Never Never Socks.

Weaving In Cotton Ends

If you’ve ever tried to weave in cotton ends and used the method you use for wool ends, chances are the experience wasn’t a pleasant one. Wool will stick to itself, and you can sew your ends in with a tapestry needle or even just pull them behind floats if you did color work, and expect those ends to stay where you put them. Cotton, on the other hand, is slippery, won’t stick to itself, so if you tried to sew it in that way it would pop out almost immediately.

The good news is, there is a method for securing cotton ends that I actually like better than its woolen counterpart. I’d say the security of the ends is actually one of the greatest benefits of cotton. If this is your first time working with cotton, give yourself a little pep talk about the merit of knots before starting. Most knitters are anti-knot, but in this case, a knot will be your best friend. Don’t worry, it will disappear into your knitting and won’t impact the aesthetic appeal of your work.

1. When breaking your yarn make sure to leave yourself a decent sized end. I usually go with 3”-4”. Thread this end through your tapestry needle.
2. With the wrong side of your work facing, use the tapestry needle to weave or sew in the end, just as you would with wool, bringing it ½” away from the edge of the work (or further, it doesn’t really matter where you put it as long as it’s not at the very edge of the work) and pulling it as snug as you want it to be.
3. Take the end off of the tapestry needle and use your fingers to untwist it allowing you to see the plies. Use your fingers or the tapestry needle (I find it’s easiest to use the tip of your needle to and spear it between the plies) to separate the plies of the yarn into 2 halves. Baah-Free is a 4 ply yarn, so I’m separating that into two 2-ply sections.
4. Thread only 1 of those sections onto the tapestry needle and use the needle to move the section a half a stitch away from the other section. The goal here is to have them as close as possible while still coming up out of the fabric in different spots.
5. Tie the 2 sections into a double knot. A square knot is particularly good here. Pull that knot TIGHT. Like, much tighter than feels reasonable. Cotton yarn can take a lot more tension than wool. When you’ve pulled the knot as tight as you can without breaking it, snip the ends very close to the knot. When you block the piece that little knot will fade into the fabric and hold there forever.

~Megan-Anne

*It’s like the Disney Vault, but woollier**.

**More woolen?