Four Tips for Knitting with Handspun Yarn

I find it difficult to cast on with my handspun yarn because I label it ‘too Precious‘. I feel hesitant to let those wonderful, bouncy skeins out of my grip and onto the needles. I wonder if I’ll have enough yarn to complete the project, or I worry that the pattern won’t ‘do justice’ to a yarn that took so long to make by hand. If you find yourself with similar handspun hesitations, here are some tips to help you get passed the fear and get started.

1. Start small and simple

Small, simple projects are a great place to start with handspun. Their simplicity will spotlight the beauty of the yarn, and you won’t need to spin too much yardage to complete them.

For example, our Tall Dark and Handsome pattens have simple textures that will let handmade yarn shine. Both the free Barley hat pattern (for worsted/aran weight yarn) and free Barley Light hat pattern (for fingering/sock weight yarn) will highlight a complex handspun, thanks to their simple stockinette and garter stitch panels. And the free World’s Simplest Mittens pattern has three gauge options, so there’s bound to be one that will work for your special handmade yarn.

2. Stripe it up

When you don’t have enough yardage in one colourway to complete a project in a single colour, use stripes and slip-stitch patterns to your advantage.

If you’re interested in the Bumble beanie pattern, check out this post that highlights the different effects you can get from working the pattern with one or two colours – and the lovely, distinct textures they elicit on each side of the work.

Our Mad Colour ebook is full of vibrant patterns designed for mixing and matching yarns, making them perfect for creating colourful stripes with your handspun lovelies.

3. Combine handspun with other yarns

Adding a mill-spun yarn to the mix can stretch the yardage further than if you knit an entire project in handspun alone. What if you worked the colourwork section of a project using your handspun, and then picked a commercial yarn for the remainder?

I recently made a Flax sweater for Neve using up the remainders of several beautiful handspun skeins, striping them together with coordinating hand-dyed and commercial yarns. Here are a few more ideas, if you’d like to try your hand at some different combinations:

• Knit the contrast-colour sections of the Fleet hat using small amounts of your lovely handspun.
• Feature small amounts of one or two handmade yarns in the Twisp hat or Embers hat, while working the body in hand-dyed or mill-dyed yarn.
• Stripe up the Prism hat with with 50yds or less of handspun (stripes are also an excellent way to make a self-striping colourway really shine!).
• Use your exquisite handspun colourway as the contrast colour in a yoke sweater like Embers, Dog Star, Icefall, or another pattern from Strange Brew, our book of yoke sweater designs.

For more ideas, browse all of the colourwork patterns on our website.

4. Stop fretting and just cast on already!

Nothing can make the uncertainty go away like the simple act of casting on. Once I have a yarn on the needles, it often whispers to me what it wants to become. And if it doesn’t work? Just rip, rip, rip it out and start again!

I’ve fallen deeply in love with spinning over the past few months (check out my handspun highlights on Instagram). If you’re a handspun enthusiast like me, please comment to share any advice, tips, and inspirations you may have!

~ Em