Yesterday, I spent my lunch hour at various bead stores trying to pick out beads that would work well with the Malabrigo yarn that I bought for the Simple Knitted Bodice sweater. [an aside - love the pattern, but what kind of a name is that? Isn’t that what all sweaters are… simple knitted bodices?]

Here’s the yarn I ordered. This is my first experience with Malabrigo, and from what I can tell, it really is as fabulous as everyone says. It’s softer than Manos, and about 2/3 the price. I haven’t seen the Tilli Tomas yarn that the pattern calls for in person, but I’m guessing this is as close as I’ll get in a wool yarn.

I picked out 9 different beads to swatch with the yarn. Unfortunately, my two favorite beads didn’t have big enough holes to work with the yarn. I suspected as much when I bought them, but thought I’d try anyway. So, I ended up swatching with 7 different beads:

Note that the bottom 2/3 of my swatch looks really pretty awful. I didn’t exactly think about what I was doing before I started swatching. I just took a look at the lace pattern, thought to myself, “easy, peasy!”, and cast on. Well, if I had thought about it a little bit, I would have realized that this sweater is worked in the round. So, every other row of the lace pattern is a knit row. Since I was knitting the swatch flat, I should have made those rows into purl rows to keep a stockinette pattern on the front side. Oops! I realized my mistake after I had already knit in 2/3 of the beads, and didn’t want to rip out all the beadwork, so the last 1/3 of the swatch is right. Hopefully you can still get a good feel for how the beads look in the incorrectly knit section.

Here’s my opinion on the beads (top to bottom):

Coffee colored glass - I like these quite a bit. They are warm and add a bit of contrast. They also look similar to the amber beads in the TT Rockstar Burnt Olive yarn.

Large green glass - I like these too, but worry they might be too big. These are similar to the green beads in the TT Rockstar Olive yarn.

Gold colored glass - Eh, not bad. I’m undecided.

Small green with brown swirls - These are kind of cool, but they blend in to the yarn and are barely visible. If I’m going to go to the trouble of using beads, I’d like to be able to see them!

Silver colored glass - The cool color of these beads doesn’t really go with the yarn.

Bronze beads - Similar to the coffee colored glass, but I think I like the transparency of the glass beads better.

Irridescent multi-color - My least favorite. I thought the mix of colors would be cool. It’s not.

Overall, I’d have to say the top three beads are my favorite, but I’m completely undecided. Please leave a comment and let me know which beads I should use for the sweater. Thanks!