Bamboozled

I never thought I’d rage-quit an entire fibre type until now.

As summer approaches, knitters like me start looking for fibres that are suitable for the warmer weather. So, I decided to give Lion Brand TruBoo, a DK-weight yarn made with 100% bamboo, a try. The yarn felt incredibly soft and had a lovely lustre that set it apart from other fibres I have worked with.

My excitement was short-lived as I soon discovered that bamboo yarn is extremely slippery. The stitches would fall off my needles with the slightest movement, and even the tiniest pull on a stitch would cause a cataclysmic chain reaction of uneven tension.

I lost count of how many times I frogged and restarted the same project. I felt like Sisyphus, never able to finish, as something always went wrong, and I had to start over. I’m no stranger to making mistakes in my knitting, but there was something about the composition of bamboo that made mistakes hard to ignore. And trying to fix them as I went only made it worse.

It took several weeks of frogging, deep breathing, patience, and breaks to complete my first bamboo garment. It was a Botanical Tee designed by Knitatude with a column of lacey leaves, and it turned out beautifully. I will have to wait a while before I can wear it again, however, as I recently got my hair touched up and I don’t want the magenta and blue dye to transfer onto the pale grey material.

Thinking I had overcome the bamboo challenge, I decided to get more TruBoo in darker colours to make more summer garments that I could sport regardless of how recently I’d been to the hair salon. I should have quit while I was ahead, though, I was back to square one, struggling against the slippery fibre once again.

Despite the difficulty, I am still proud of myself for persevering and completing my one-hit bamboo wonder. That being said, I have learned my lesson and will stick to cotton for summer garments in the future.