kniteracy | The Grand EFA Experiment (Reply)

The Enchanted Forest Aran is going to be an experimental piece Because, you know, I just like experiments. And why not? Consider it an exercise in destashing.

First of all, we have lovely Falkland Islands Wool, a gift from a coworker. I thought it would be a good ground for this cardigan. This morning, I began a swatch in this wool, just to see how it would hold the moss stitch that forms the basis of the EFA. I made a 20stx18rw swatch, loved the way it looked, and decided how to figure out how much wool I needed to complete the EFA in this stuff. Alas, the Falkland Islands Wool doesn't give yardage or meter length, only skein weight. And there's nothing on Yarndex or Ravelry giving the length of an average skein of this wool. So I set out to figure out how to find the length of the wool in 50g of Falkland Islands Wool. First, I called

aunty_marion, the keeper of the Knitronomicon, who suggested measuring out 10g of the wool to get a partial length, then multiplying to get an approximate length of skein. But

filceolaire, my favourite engineer, had another idea.

It turned out my swatch weighed 10g. He calculated the number of stitches in the swatch and then measured it against the whole garment. The swatch in the Falkland Islands Wool was 18 rows x 20 stitches = 360 stitches. This swatch weighed 10g, which equals 1/5 of a 50g ball of the Falkland Islands Wool. 1 ball equals 360x5 stitches, or 1800 stitches.

Using the garment charts and diagrams, we saw that the front of each side was 126 st x 137 rows = 17262 stitches, ignoring reductions for armhole shaping. So that's the front of the EFA cardigan. The back and sleeves are approximately the same (a little less for the sleeves), so multplying this figure x 3 = 51786 stitches. This is a generous estimate, but we'd rather err on the side of too much wool rather than not enough.

The whole garment needs 51,786 stitches. Dvided by 1800 stitches, we see that we need 29 balls (possibly a bit of an overestimate, since we ignored the armhole shaping decreases) of Falkland Islands Wool to complete this project. Not nearly enough. I have 18.

HOWEVER.

In my stash, I also have 8 100g hanks of Rowan Magpie Aran, in a colour so similar you might ot be able to tell them apart unless you touched them: the Rowan is very much softer than the Falkland Islands Wool. It looks to be about the same weight. Each 100g hank has 153 yards of wool. (approximate, of course). The EFA needs 3,120 yards of wool, according to Vogue (pretty accurate, probably). If we divide 3,120 by 153, we get 20.58, so I'd need 21 skeins of the Rowan to complete the whole garment. I have eight. Again, not nearly enough.

You probably see where I'm going with this....

Here's the deal. I don't really like cream coloured aran wool all that much, but this project will look good in it, particularly if we later overdye to a colour I like (like the sage/moss green discussed in previous posts). Now you know why I started Celtic Dreams before even swatching the EFA. It was so that I'd have a calm, easy project to work on while I was doing all this math for the other one.

Well, actually being married to an engineer is full of goodness and perk;

filceolaire did all the stitch math and even explained it to me while I was beginning this post, so I would look slightly smarter to you people.

The current plan is to do the front and back of the cardigan in the Falkland Islands Wool, and the ribbing, sleeves, button bands, and shawl collar in the Rowan.

Knitters, please take a look at the photographs below. They're pretty accurate for colour, taken in broad daylight, and the gauge is just very, very slightly smaller with the Rowan (why I'm choosing it for ribbing and shawl collar; the properties of the wool will work for me here). I'm interested in straight advice: do you think I should continue with this experiment? I really want to knit this cardigan, I can't possibly afford to buy a whole bunch of new wool to knit it with, I like both these yarns even though they're different-- and I know that unless I decide to give copious amounts of wool away sometime soon, they're not leaving my stash unless I do something radical. Like this.

What do you think?

Enchanted Forest Aran from the front
As pictured in the Vogue Knitting 25-year retrospective.

Enchanted Forest Aran from the back
As pictured in the Vogue Knitting 25-year retrospective.

Our Two Wools
On the left, the Rowan Magpie. 100g of soft new wool goodness. Standard cream aran colour. On the right, the Falkland Islands Wool. 50g of lofty aran wool goodness. The semicompleted swatch is just in the Falklands Island Wool.

Completed Swatch, 1
Here's the completed swatch, on US9/5.5mm needles, with both wools side by side. Yes, the colour difference is noticeable, but the gauge is almost exactly the same. The current plan is to do the front and back in the Falkland Islands wool, which is stiffer and will hold the patterns very well, and the sleeves and ribbing in the Rowan.