I had never seen this yarn before Alice sent me two skeins in October of This yarn was different from other yarns I had worked with at the time, since it was the first which contained soy silk. To test out this yarn I came up with two patterns, a pouch you can attach to your belt and a Nintendo DS Lite cozy. My first impression of this yarn was that it was beautiful. The shades in the New Splash colorway are vibrant, and contains shades of purple, blue, pink, and yellow.
The transition between colors is gradual, and that alone makes this yarn worth owning. The yarn is soft and feels nice against your skin. It has a slight sheen under some lights but is not very prominent. I was a bit surprised to find that the thickness of the yarn was not constant. Yarn thickness varies slightly and gradually on the scale of several inches to a foot. This slight thick and thin texture causes stitches to look less even and a little sloppy, and thicker portions are a bit splitty.
I have no problem with small or large scale thickness variations in yarn as long as it is intended to be that way. However, it appears that this slight thickness variation leads to variations in gauge when comparing different parts of the knitted fabric.
The first gauge problem I encountered while knitting the belt pouch. I thought that the change in gauge would be temporary but the yarn remained thin for the rest of the skein.
That would be equivalent to suddenly switching to smaller sized needles half way through your project for no reason at all. The resulting fabric looked uneven and sloppy. The unevenness could not be fixed by blocking either because the change in yarn was just too great. The second gauge problem occurred while knitting the swatch pictured. I did not realize how much the gauge had changed until after I laid the swatch out flat and measured the dimensions.
