Loopy for Bouclé

Bouclé is a french word for curly. With your forbearance in the next few posts, I will take the liberty of using this word as an adjective, a verb, and a noun.

In this manufactured green bouclé yarn sample, you can see evenly-spaced, tidy curls that are plied into the yarn. This yarn is fairly thin and the loops are small. A knitted fabric from it would drape nicely and would also have a uniform curly texture with a short nap.




In this red knitted hat brim, the loops of the bouclé yarn are of a thick and fluffy, loosely-spun roving that was plied around a worsted weight yarn. The result is a soft uneven texture with a fairly tall nap.



In handspinning, a bouclé yarn can be created by loosely plying one strand of fiber around another so that the loose strand forms little circles of fiber that stand out from the other strand which becomes a sort of core yarn. This may not be a good description because I'm no expert (having only tried a bouclé yarn once in a spin class.)

For the same reason (no expertise) I make another disclaimer. Perhaps what I created and am showing you next is not really yarn because the loops are not plied.




Is it yarn? If it wasn't made by plying, how was it created? How big is it? What's it for? You'll find answers to these and other questions in the next post.