Fun with a sett gauge

Bear with me for this post, as it’s rather graphics-intensive.

My sister-in-law gave me three gorgeous skeins of yarn (Fiesta’s La Boheme) for Christmas, and I bought a skein of Blue Heron hand-dyed yarn (top skein) that seemed to match:

On looking at it, though, I wasn’t sure whether the combination was going to be too “busy”, what with the color changes and the glitz and the three different yarns (Fiesta’s “La Boheme” is two strands: mohair and rayon boucle). So what to do?

I whipped out my trusty sett gauge:

This nifty little gadget is just a square of wood with one-inch-wide cutouts along all four sides. The idea is that you wrap the yarn around it to get the number of wraps per inch, then you can also test different setts by wrapping the desired number of ends per inch around one set of notches, then needleweaving through the other set of notches to see what a given sett will look like.

I wasn’t sure I liked it. Too busy. So I started wondering whether a more mild-mannered yarn might be better with the Boheme. I didn’t have any in a matching color, of course, so I whipped out a few yards of Henry’s Attic Carrera (formerly Silk’n’Ivory) and quickly dyed it a light purple. It matched the color fairly nicely:

I tried needleweaving this one and got this swatch:

I liked this swatch better. Comparing the two:

I think which one you like best is a matter of taste, but I think the left-hand swatch (with the single-colored Silk’n’Ivory) shows off the La Boheme yarn better. So I will probably dye my own yarn to weave with this particular yarn, and save that spectacular Blue Heron yarn (the top one in the top photo) for another project.

But I got to use my sett gauge for the first time!