Last year some time, Lion Brand was having a sale and I purchased yarn of various fiber content to try out. One skein that I bought was a Touch of Linen, which is part of the Touch of Luxe yarn collection, in the color stone. This is a plied yarn and can split but I was careful to make sure the needle was inserted under all plies of the stitch. It's made of 51% cotton and 49% linen and feels nice and soft.
I read somewhere that linen is absorbent and dries faster than cotton so I thought knitting a small hand towel would be a good project and a way to get familiar with the yarn. I had the pattern Goldenrod Towel in my craft file for quite a while and although it calls for Chenille yarn, I used the Touch of Linen yarn.
I started this project in January and worked on it as time allowed and finished it last week. I used size 7 (4.5 mm) needles [made of bamboo] which is the suggested needle size listed on the yarn label. I followed most of the pattern as written except I knit a shorter length of the body pattern stitches. I knit approximately 13" of the body pattern before adding the ending border stitches. The finished size of this project was approximately 19" long x 8 1/4"-8 1/2" wide. I could tell the width was off a little in some areas of the length so my tension must have been off. However, it still turned out nice and not too noticeable.
The knit fabric produced by this yarn feels nice to the skin and I now want to try knitting my first garment with it. So with that idea, I decided to experiment and try the blocking technique to see how the yarn would react. I soaked the towel for about 20 minutes, squeezed out the water and set it out as evenly as I could and pinned to the blocking boards to dry overnight. The dried size was approximately 18" long x 9 1/2"-9 3/4" wide. After that, I took it a step further and machine washed and dried the towel. Always double check the yarn label for directions. The Touch of Linen yarn is machine washable and indicates to lay items flat to dry. Since I'm experimenting and this project is a hand towel (a machine wash and dry kind of item), I wanted to see the effects of machine drying the yarn. Well, the towel may have shrunk a little more but is still soft and looks fine after its first machine wash and dry cycle! The final finished size is about 16" long x 9"-9 1/2" wide.
