The downside to using wonderfully soft merino when making a sweater is the pilling that can happen. Some yarns will pill a bit worse than others. As is the case of my worsted boxy I believe I dyed up some Blue Thunder and So Fly on my old Chunky base which is 96% merino wool and a 4% nylon binder. Naturally in hindsight not the best yarn to make a sweater, but it's so squishy I still love it.
EDIT: The yarn was actually a wosted base that I never carried in the shop but did use it for myself. I ended up not choosing it for the shop because it was only 181 yards, but the yarn was 100% merino wool. After having someone ask me what yarn I used I had to double check my project page and go check the different yarn suppliers to determine what yarn it was made of. Ultimately I went with my Papi base because of the yardage.
The pilling had gotten so bad that I wasn't wanting to wear it out of the house, so off to Google to search various ways to de pill a sweater.
Ways to De Pill a sweater
1. Scissors
2. Clean Razor or beard trimmer: Pull fabric tight and gently shave sweater.
3. Sweater Stone which is like a pumice stone. Fair warning I tried out a pumice stone trying to be careful and it pulled on the fabric. I do not recommend using a pumice stone.
4. Sweater Comb
5. Gleener - If you're interested in picking one of these up from amazon please feel free to purchase through my amazon storefront. It's greatly appreciated.
So this week I decided to try out using what I had on hand
a clean razor
A Schick Quatttro for women to be more precise.
* I personally don't know if using different razors would have better/worse results. I just used what I had.
I layed out my Worsted Boxy and grabbed my razor and got to work. Now remember this sweater pilled really bad and while I had been pulling off pills it wasn't really doing much.
I was trying to be gentle while shaving my sweater since you could potentially cut the stitches.
I'm not sure if I was doing it too gently at first but I felt like I was only able to remove the pillage if I used a bit more force. As you can see from the photo above there is still pilling.
It took such a long time to even get my sweater looking decent and I still wasn't able to get rid of all the pilling. Don't get me wrong the razor method worked well enough but it definitely doesn't look new. If I spent more time on it I could possibly get it looking brand new, but that would be extra knitting time that I don't want to waste.
I think I will try the razor method on one of my sweaters that doesn't have as much pillage to see how well it works.
I will be trying some of the other options as well eventually.
Overall I believe that the pros of using a razor greatly out weighs the cons. Since the con is if you aren't careful you can make it worse by cutting the fabric. I wasn't being super careful, but I also managed to not cut any of the stitches.
And let's face it given the choice of spending money to buy a de piller in either the form of a sweater stone, sweater comb or gleener when you could just get another skein of yarn. I'm sure many of you have picked the same route that I have and gone with the yarn.
* Note this is not a sponsored post. I have purchased said razor for my own personal use.