If you have spent any time looking at knitting swatches, and unless this is your profession there is little reason you would have, you will have seen them. Those multi-coloured, single jersey sections that begin and end the actual work. Simple, fast, purposeful.
They appear in colours you never requested, never saw on a colour card, and would never have chosen. Lower ply, less yarn, made at speed. They serve a far simpler purpose than the work sandwiched between them. They are the beginning and the end. They are what keeps a sample from unravelling into a pile of yarn. The magic element most often forgotten on the factory floor.
They are commonly know as waste yarn, or separation yarn. Highly unglamorous.
I have tried to replicate this before, with little success. Attempt it using a space-dye technique and you arrive somewhere closer to Missoni than intended; too considered, lacking the particular quality that only accident can produce. You cannot select the right colours. A casually collected array of odds and ends will never be recreated by choice. And yet, this elusive thing is probably the most commonly knitted fabric produced in any factory in the world. Nobody has harnessed it. Everybody wants to.
Its appeal is the disorder. The chaos set against the repetitive cleanliness of the working swatch beside it. Playful and wild against whatever sober or refined selection you made on your sample request. It is everything your intended garment is not. You are not supposed to love it. And yet, you can't help adore it.
It recalls miniature cellophane bags of pick and mix, licorice allsorts, buckets of jelly beans. Youthful and carefree. Alchemy in yarn. The source of endless discussion and fascination and obsession.
