From Disaster to Unexpected Win: the Merino-Silk Saga
By Fernando Santos
I set out to knit a birthday cardigan in a brand-new blend. What I got was a stunning fibre, a house full of fluff, and one small bag. This is the honest version.
The plan
Every so often I test a new fibre. Partly to see whether it earns a place in the shop for a future collection, partly because I recommend blends for you to buy, and I only recommend what I've handled myself. This time I had the perfect excuse: my mother-in-law's birthday, late in September. The plan was a lovely cardigan in a new blend of grey and white merino silk. Silver, soft, with a shine my everyday Corriedale doesn't do. If it behaved, it would be a good test for a future winter drop.
What came out of the box
The first look was genuinely exciting. The fibres were lovely: vibrant, silvery, with that soft shine only silk gives. I laid the roving out on the studio floor and admired it for a while before touching a needle.
Where it fell apart
The trouble started the moment I began prepping it the Gigante way, splitting and combing the roving into the texture chunky knitting needs. It broke. The fibres almost didn't hold together at all. And I'll admit to committing another crime here: fibres this fine were never meant to be split and separated. A blend like this is made for spinning and felting, and it would be beautiful in finer knitting and crochet projects. But chunky asks the one thing it can't do: hold together as one thick, calm strand. Instead it comes undone as you handle it. Strands lift, separate and float off in every direction.
Stunning to look at. A nightmare to knit.
Within the hour my house was covered in fluff. The table, the chairs, my clothes, the air itself. Everything. I called it what it was: a complete disaster, and I shelved the idea.
Sending it back (almost all of it)
The unopened bags went straight back to the supplier. But one kilo was already open, which made it mine. Rather than bin it, I tried a rescue: I submerged the whole lot in water and let it dry, the same blocking idea that settles a finished knit. The drying took forever; luckily the UK was having one of its hot spells, so I didn't have to wait too long. And it half worked. The fibres calmed down and became manageable; still fluffy, still shedding, but workable if you're patient and don't mind hoovering afterwards.
The bag that survived
So the rescued kilo became a bag. A chunky mini bag in that silver grey, knitted tight so the fibres support each other. I won't pretend it's pristine. You don't get the super-defined stitches merino gives. It's messy, fuzzy, silvery. And that might be exactly the look that attracts some people.
Because this fibre is fine and dense, I managed to work out a lot of the construction problems that chunky offers, especially around carrying weight. Don't get me wrong, our bags are lovely. They're definitely not for heavy stuff. And the new bag isn't either: you can't do your weekly shopping with it (hey, it's not a shopping bag), but you can comfortably carry a small laptop and a few personal items.
So I worked out a new strap: an i-cord that supports the weight through the front of the bag, not the sides. And that was a lovely finding.
I still don't know what to do with the prototype. I might donate it to friends. But I am very pleased with this mistake.
Lemon, lemonade, caipirinha
They say you can always turn a lemon into lemonade. I'd say this one made a caipirinha.
The merino-silk cardigan idea is parked, not dead. If I ever find a version of this blend with more grip, I'll try again for winter. Meanwhile, the birthday cardigan gets knitted in wool that behaves (there's a whole story on how our usual wool is prepped, and it behaves precisely because of that half-hour of prep). And I keep the bag.
There's a second moral hiding in the rescue, too: no matter how weird and different your project looks along the way, blocking transforms the fibres, and the entire look of your cardigan. But that's a subject for the next post.
To be continued…
After wool that behaves?
Every fibre in the shop is one I've actually knitted with, prepped by hand at this same table:
Keep reading
What Actually Happens to Raw Wool Before It Becomes a Cardigan
The half-hour of hand-prep that makes our usual wool behave the way this blend wouldn't.
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