premier fruits sock yarn – blueberry

One of my first inspirations to make this blog is actually this exact yarn – the sock weight of the Fruits line by Premier Yarns!

Ultimately, I picked up 2 skeins of the Fruits sock yarn in Blueberry. It’s a beautiful combination of blues, with sections of white yarn with dark blue speckles, to represent seeds. (Close up of my skein in the gallery at the end of this post!) Each skein is sold on the Premier Yarns website for 3.99 USD (as of writing this post) This sock yarn is 93% Acrylic and 7% PBT.

I chose a pattern for a sock yarn beanie. I’m not sharing that pattern here, because I didn’t have the best experience with it, and I don’t think that is the creator’s fault! I’m still a beginner, and I’ll share my lessons learned through this post.

First mistake: the pattern called for a 3.00mm hook, and I only had a 2.75mm hook handy, so I began with that. This made my stitches tight and honestly, I really, really loved that look! The pattern has you start with a magic circle, and if you’re familiar at all with amigurumi, it works in rounds in the exact same way. Single crochets and increases.

First impressions with this yarn – felt really nice in the hand, and I experienced no splitting. The stitch definition is fantastic, and I can see exactly where I need to put my hook every time. Of course, not to the fault of this yarn, seeing the stitches of the darker colors in the skein was a smidge harder. This is expected with darker colored yarns, but even then, I still had little-to-no issue!

It was about this point of the project where I noticed something that got progressively more annoying through each round. This yarn squeaked terribly on my Prym hook! It’s a non-metal hook (I’ll tentatively say it’s plastic) and every movement of yarn on the hook became really noisy (annoying). I’m leaning toward this being an issue of the combination of the yarn and hook. I’ve never had this problem when using this hook for making beaded ornaments with cotton sock yarns, and once I switched to a metal hook (Tulip Etimo Red, love them!), the sound significantly decreased. I wouldn’t say I’m typically sensitive to the sound of crochet, so for me to become bothered by it, it’s safe to say it was a bit excessive, lol

Now here’s another moment where I strayed from the pattern. Because I was using a smaller hook, I assumed I wasn’t going to be at the same size as the pattern maker was by the time we got to SC-around-city. So, once I got there, I did a row of SC, a row with increases, row of SC, row of increases. This pattern, in the second to last step, utilizes a technique to create a ribbed effect, by double crocheting in an alternating pattern of FLO (Front Loop Only), BLO (Back Loop Only). I made sure to increase in such a way that I would be left with an even number of stitches, as the pattern has you stop increasing at an even number.

So, I single crocheted around and around and around. Here’s where we were at the end of the single crochets, and about halfway through the double crochet rounds!

I knew I wanted to finish the hat with a couple rounds of a complimenting color. I hopped over to one of my local Joanns – which is unfortunately closing 😦 – and picked up a skein of Big Twist Baby Bunny in the colorway Vanilla Cake. It’s a light cream color.

I tried an amigurumi technique I learned for straight-edge color changing with the cream yarn. Basically, you slip stitch BLO around the entirety of the project, then continue your pattern as written. I’ve used this to make a couple projects and love the effect it creates, but with this specific cream yarn it was horrendously splitty. I’m not exactly sure what caused this, but I scrapped the idea, did a typical color change, and moved on.

So, here is the finished hat!

I adore how the blueberry yarn looks worked up, it is so, so, so cute!!! All of the colors within the skein work beautifully together. I was surprised that even when the darkest and lightest colors were next to each other, it looked great! The cream color is a cute accent and, in my opinion, helps anchor an all-over-the-place color blocking.

Here’s a picture of the hat on… about 5 minutes after finishing it with a raging migraine lol. Next time I wear it out I’ll make sure to take a couple decent pictures and update this post!

I think I’d be lying if I said I’m 100% happy with how this project turned out. I want to stress – it is absolutely not because of either yarns or the pattern! I think the main gripe I have with the project is how it fits.

Despite being an “emo”-adjacent kid in my teens… (I listened to P!ATD and FOB… but also many of the emo staples. hence the air quotes lol) …I’m not really a beanie person! I don’t really like how they look on me. Honestly, I was never even a hat person until the last 8 or so months! I’ve gotten into trucker hats, and of course love a good winter hat, but something about how tight it sits to my head looks so odd to me lol.

Just yesterday I picked up a beautiful hank of worsted weight SW Merino yarn to make my husband a hat to wear on our upcoming trip abroad. I’m curious to see how I feel about that hat once it’s finished… maybe I’m just not a sock-yarn hat girlie? If I end up liking how that hat looks on me, I want to make another hat with the Fruits yarn, but the worsted weight variety!

Alrighty… let’s get on to the yarn review recap.

PROS	CONS
– Affordable – Looks beautiful worked up – Self striping – Fantastic stitch definition – Finished fabric is light and not scratchy	– Hard to find (online only) – Less control of where colors land (due to being self-striping) – Not a ton of stretch when worked in SC w/ a 2.75mm hook

I highly recommend all readers check out the Premier Yarns site and look at all of the beautiful fruit colorways available! Make sure to look at all of the weights, as some of the fruits are seemingly exclusive to one weight. _{kijhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn ^{– added by Babka the cat}}

Let me know what you think below!

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