Berroco Pure Merino

By Megan Goodacre

Berroco Pure Merino

Tuesday morning after a weekend of pie, turkey, gravy, stuffing, pie, gravy, whipped cream, mashed potato, pie. Not quite ready to face anything challenging. Playing around with Instagram, the free iPhone app. Like what it does to humble iPad photos, and the instant gratification of uploading pages to Facebook.

Can't quite figure out how to get my instagram photos on to my Tricksy Knitter wall instead of my personal wall. Ah well. Here's a couple of snapshots showing Berroco Pure Merino.

The Ferguson Cowl pattern is coming along nicely. A group of generous and enthusiastic test knitters are looking at it now. I have finished two in totally different yarns. One in a silk/merino hand dyed from Sweatermaker Yarns. It's a single-ply yarn, about aran or worsted weight, and it made a lightweight, soft cowl.

The other is Berroco Pure Merino. It's a 8-ply multistrand superwash yarn. elann had this on sale a while ago, and I bought three colours. Pure Merino has been discontinued, but I'll bet it's in a lot of stashes, I saw it on sale in a couple of places.

I find Berroco Pure Merino lovely to work with. Smooth and springy. I knew from reading the comments on Ravelry, and from my gauge swatches, that this yarn tends to grow on washing. I think this happens because the yarn is so elastic and relaxes when it gets wet.

So I moved down a needle size, and blocked my swatch thoroughly. However, when I compared the finished and blocked cowl to the blocked gauge swatch, the cowl's gauge is bigger. So, with a stretchy yarn, the larger the item, the fatter the gauge. For more on gauge, check out to save time check gauge.

I'm working on another England Avenue Cardigan for myself, in a deep teal Berroco Pure Merino. I wonder how much it will stretch on blocking?

(For more on ply, here's a great article on ply on knitty.com, thank you knitty!)