Cowls, Classes and Yarn Snobbery

This term I have introduced my crochet students to cables and bobbles. I designed some cowls in chunky yarn that work up quickly for a cosy winter accessory.

My students are not yarn snobs like me (not yet anyway!) and balk at the idea of paying upwards of £12 for a skein of luxury, hand dyed yarn. I get the feeling, because they are too polite to say it outright, that they even think spending more than £3 on a 100g ball is verging on pricey.

With this in mind, I have to choose the recommended yarn for projects very carefully. I hate using cheap acrylic for projects - not only is it often horrible to work with and rough next to the skin but I also don't see the point in spending time making something in a material that is all so common on the high-street and usually at the fraction of the price. 

For this project I chose King Cole Magnum Lightweight Chunky - a blend of acrylic and wool in a reasonable range of colours. Not the softest of yarns to be honest but the smoothness and twist makes it easy to work with and it's certainly quite a bit nicer than some of the plastic looking chunky 100% acrylic yarns available. It can be found online for under £3 a ball (Wool Warehouse sells it for £2.99 and have very good and quick service). The project requires 2 x 100g so the students can make a cowl for under £6.

Having said all this, I did purchase a couple of more expensive balls of Stylecraft Alpaca Chunky (£3.99 for 100g) to make a cowl for myself (I love alpaca). One of my students spied the fluffy loveliness in my basket and declared that she would like to make her cowl out of the same yarn. 

"It's a bit more expensive", I warned her. 

"I don't mind." she said, " I prefer it because it's softer." 

I thought to myself, "She's taken the first step towards becoming a yarn snob!"

A couple of the other students also preferred the alpaca. I'm glad they prefer the nicer yarn but it did cause me an issue - I'd written the cowl patterns for the King Cole Magnum which is a thicker yarn than Stylecraft Alpaca. It meant I had to modify the patterns to also work with this thinner yarn - in essence write two more patterns, Luckily this was pretty easy to do as I'd tried to make the patterns as simple as possible.

By the time this course is finished I think I'll have made almost 10 cowls! I must try to get the patterns properly published too with some better photos so you can see what they look like when being worn.

I've got another beginner's crochet course at the Riverhouse Barn starting on 23rd February 2015... so if you live in Surrey, near Walton-on-Thames and fancy learning to crochet, why not give it a go? For more details, click here...