Project Report: 2026 Wk 6

This week, I focused on comfort knitting rather than productivity knitting. 

I had a really difficult day last Wednesday, so I had to be gentle with myself on Thursday. I slept in, watched people make sushi on YouTube, and treated myself to a "swatch party" so I could try out my most recently acquired yarns.

In the past, I've considered swatching to be the first step of a particular project -- one that I typically rushed through or skipped altogether in order to get to the good part. Now I've learned that if I treat swatching as part of the yarn shopping experience, I get much more helpful information from my swatches. When my package arrives, I play with each of my new treasures by making a swatch. That's what I did on Thursday.

I started with the worsted weight Berroco Comfort. 

I haven't worked with the worsted weight before, but I absolutely love the fingering weight version. My favorite socks are Berroco Comfort socks. I've run them through the regular laundry -- dryer and all -- a good 15 times now and they still look pristine. I'm happy to report that the worsted weight is just as soft and buttery as the fingering weight, plus you can get a phenomenal drape without sacrificing the integrity of the fabric. Love, love, love this yarn.

Next, I moved on to the StyleCraft ReCreate yarn. 

StyleCraft is a new brand for me, but WEBS recently started carrying it, making it much more accessible to us in the US. ReCreate is a recycled wool and acrylic blend with lots of little flecks of multicolored fibers in the yarn, giving it an effect that falls somewhere between confetti and tweed. While I have zero complaints about this yarn -- it is exactly what you would expect a wool and acrylic blend to be -- I think I had an unrealistic anticipation of something mindblowingly awesome. It's not awesome, but it's perfectly serviceable and I personally really enjoy the sprinkling of tweedy color. For me, this will probably become my experimentation yarn when I want to try a new stitch pattern or make a prototype of a design. In the future, I would consider making a cardigan with it, but I don't think it's soft enough to be worn next to skin for most people.

I also ordered some Berroco Gaia from the clearance section, but I haven't swatched with that yet. 

I'd like it to become a summer garment, but I'll need to find a complementary yarn to pair it with to stretch the yardage. Gaia is a DK weight, 100% recycled blend of 70% cotton and 30% polyester. If you have any recommendations for something similar, please let me know.

As far as my works in progress go... they're still in progress. Those pink socks are still on the needles, being fully ignored. I cast on a second pair of socks with some West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4-Ply, but those are all kinds of ridiculous, so we'll talk more about that next week. My Floozy sweater currently has one-and-a-half sleeves, which is exactly one-and-a-half sleeves more than it had last week, but still half a sleeve away from being done with working sleeves on US Size 1 needles, so that's unfortunate.

I've promised myself a worsted weight colorwork project when I finally finish my sleeves. For now, these are just sitting on my coffee table, taunting me with their squishiness.