Interesting Yarns-Blog Post

Giovanna Seminar
Giovanna Seminar

We had a wonderful time with Giovanna Imperia at her Saturday Seminar on Non-traditional Materials.  She talked about some of the amazing and interesting yarns in our new GevolveYarn Line and we learned SOOOO much.  We hope you did too!

Giovanna shared lots of her incredible samples made from some of these unique yarns and we wanted to share a few of these gorgeous pieces with you.  Hopefully these images will inspire you to leap into these fascinating yarns. We learned so many things that we didn’t know.

Thermoplastics are an interesting type of yarn.  They have been created for other industrial purposes and are able to cross-over into our crafting world.  Giovanna has been playing with these yarns for a while, and we are now stocking thermoplastic yarns both with and without a stainless-steel core.

 

Here is a bracelet that Giovanna made with the thermoplastic yarn.  Once she finished knitting the bracelet, she used an embosser heat gun on some of the sections to give them an interesting color change and texture.  Now that the piece has been heated, it cannot go back to being yarn.  The heat fuses the fabric and makes it into a stable piece.   The yarn used to make this piece does not have a stainless-steel core, but we also stock a stainless-steel core yarn. You could make something that has both the moldability of stainless-steel and the thermally dynamic properties of the thermoplastic yarn. More possibilities!

Speaking of Stainless steel, the metal in stainless-steel yarns has a shapeable stiffness that can lend itself to creating fabrics or structures with shape.  In addition to weaving with the stainless-steel yarns, you can knit or crochet with them.  In this scarf, Giovanna knitted the stainless steel and cotton yarn in a lace pattern on large needles and combined it with wool for a very interesting scarf.  The openwork of the stainless steel and cotton yarn really has a wonderful juxtoposition with the solidity of the wool sections.  Lunadette thinks she looks amazing!  We have stainless steel yarns available blended with cotton and silk.

Another fascinating example of what we learned was why polyester yarns pucker and pleat when you steam them.  This change in the yarn happens because the yarn is stretched with it is spun, and when you heat the fabric, the yarn shrinks and returns to its original size.  When you have woven it with other yarns, it takes those yarns along with it for a bumpy ride when it shrinks back to its original size.  Diane Totten has been using polyester yarns to create texture too.  This sample is from her Crimp and Create workshop.

Using these Nontraditional Yarns, the possibilities are endless.  And we haven’t touched on the elastic yarns!  Those will be a blog post for another day.

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