Have you ever spent weeks or months executing a complicated project in expensive yarn, only to see it dissolve over time? I am hoping to share information that will prevent this from happening to you in the realm of brioche knitting!
Two weekends ago, I attended Nancy Marchant’s class on Fresh Ways of Knitting Brioche. It was an amazing class, and I am truly grateful to Vogue Knitting Live for hosting a yarn event close to me, in San Francisco!! I had only knitted a brioche hat and was insecure in my brioche
increases and decreases so I found Marchant’s class at VKL invaluable.
And look at this gorgeous sample of one of her leaf brioche pieces!
Now pay attention, readers, because I learned a really valuable piece of information from Nancy Marchant. Let’s face it, she is the world expert on brioche knitting and after having designed and knitted tons of brioche pieces and seen how they wear over time, she really knows what she is talking about:
DO NOT KNIT BRIOCHE USING SLIPPERY YARNs!
Yes, it is true that two-color brioche looks gorgeous knitted in superwash yarns. But don't do it! Nancy told us that she had used Indie dyed yarns for the construction of all the projects in her last book or two, and she discovered that superwash yarn is too slippery to hold the brioche stitch together. Over time, the garment could lose its structural integrity! As an example, she described a brioche scarf she had knitted for her daughter that started off pretty wide and short. But because the scarf was knitted in two superwash yarns, and that yarn was too slippery to keep those brioche stitches stuck together, over time the scarf became longer and longer and narrower and narrower until it was no longer a thing of beauty but a snake instead. YIKES!
To implement the brioche knitting skills I was learning from Marchant, I was knitting Andrea Mowry’s briochealuscious shawl, pictured above, which starts with garter and seed stitch before it works its way into brioche. The yarns, as you can see, are indie dyed: some olann sock lite, in pear green [Pear] some fuse fiber studio superwash merino [Pink Drink] and fuse sock [Verdigris], and the ivory yarn is Miss Babs 2ply toes. As I was knitting up the shawl, the garter stripe and moss stitch sections looked fine in the superwash yarn but the brioche section looked less stable. Can you see the difference?
I decided that short sections of two-color brioche, held fast by surrounding sections of moss stitch knitting would probably be okay, but I knitted the green and white brioche section on a smaller needle. I did feel an entire rick-rack edge made of brioche would not be advisable to knit in the superwash yarn. The border of a shawl is an important structural component and takes a lot of handling so I wanted to ensure a firm fabric. Nancy Marchant advised that as long as one of your two brioche colors was a grabby wool yarn, you could probably get away with using superwash for the second color. So that is what I am doing. I have switched from my lovely fuse fiber ombre pink to Jamieson’s Spindrift, which is a tweed yarn. Do you see the difference in the fibers?
While it is true that the Fuse Fiber studio drink pink colorway is much “prettier” than the Spindrift, when I experimented with combining it with my other superwash yarn to form two inches of the brioche border, it was limp and droopy and I could see exactly what Marchant was talking about. The fabric looked unstable and I felt this brioche trim would ultimately loosen and lengthen considerably, warping the entire shawl. By using the spindrift as the background color of my rick rack and using my superwash yarn to form the knit stitches that showed, the Spindrift creates a frame for the ombre effect of the companion superwash yet sticks it together:
Unfortunately, the looseness of the join made by the slippery superwash
stitches at the border join looks sloppy against the spindrift.
The difference is stunning, isn't it? So I am going to unravel the border
AGAIN (sigh!) and reknit it, using a smaller needle and tightening my yarn
when using the superwash. If that doesn't work, I will scrap superwash
altogether and use another spindrift yarn to finish the border, but
then the colors wouldn't match the rest of the shawl and the effect
would not be the same. Also, I ask myself it the brioche section
in green and cream is too unstable for me to join this edge onto?
These are all questions I wouldn't have known to ask before.
List of Yarns to Avoid when Knitting Brioche:
According to Nancy Marchant, all slippery yarns are problematic. This means you should avoid superwash yarns, silk blends, bamboo and tencel/rayon. Stick with “wooly” wools and you will have no problem preserving and keeping your brioche garments long term.