I have had some very good experiences with bamboo yarn. My favourites so far are Stella 4ply by Naturally and Bamboo 4ply by Cleckheaton. These bamboo yarns have a lustre and drape that is similar to silk and it blocks quite well too.
I haven’t had the opportunity to try any bamboo blends, so I was very excited when I received a shade card from Bendigo Woollen Mills for their new bamboo blend yarn.
Bendigo’s new yarn is called “Serenade” and it’s 20% bamboo, 80% superwash wool in an 8ply weight. I haven’t knitted with it – I’ve only groped the shade card a bit – but it does feel soft and slightly slick.
There are 13 shades in the range, which are mostly on the dark side. I like the colour Merlot and Clover is really nice too. At the moment it’s AU$13 per 200g ball – but this will be going up to $17 soon. I have quite a few 8ply patterns that I’d like to use for this yarn but I also have a huge amount of 8ply yarn in the stash that needs to be used. I really should use the stash.
For some reason, I thought that bamboo fibre was produced in a similar way to flax and linen. I expected that the banboo leaves and stalks we all squashed and beaten so only a fibre was left. Kind of like eating celery and ending up with only a mouthful of celery strings. The production of bamboo yarn is NOTHING like this – it’s a bit more like making spaetzel.
To make bamboo yarn, the hard woody parts are removed and the crushed soft parts and leaves are soaked in a sodium hydroxide bath to extract the cellulose. Then the big blob of resulting cellulose is squirted through a fine nozzle into a bath of sulfuric acid where it hardens into fibres. Then the fibres are rinsed and spun and turned into yarn.
Ok – so there are a few more steps involved but that’s essentially how bamboo is turned into yarn. Soy yarns are produced in a similar way. I’m not sure why, but I feel a bit disappointed that its a chemical extraction rather than a mechanical one.
It’s still nice to get a shade card in the post. It reminds me of being a kid when all the yarn in our house came by mail and my sisters and I would fight over who should get a jumper made in the most coveted of colours – “dusty pink”.
Well, it was the 1980s.
