Bella Arte by Pingouin is a 100% mercerized cotton yarn made in Brazil for Riot Stores.
- It comes in 100g balls with 170m per ball.
- The rrp is $12.99 a ball, but the colours I bought were $4 at the time I purchased and the rest were on sale at $7.79 a ball. Great savings!! (these are the current prices at the time of publishing)
- A 3mm crochet hook is recommended or 3.5-4.5 knitting needles.
- Gauge is specified for knit only – 10″ x 10″ equals 25 rows by 18 stitches.
- Riot sells 17 different colour, some solid, some mixed of the Bella Arte yarn.
- The label recommends a hand wash and drip dry.
- The weight of the yarn is not marked on the label, but I would place it somewhere between a dk and worsted weight.
My Observations
I crocheted 2 large swatches of the Bella Arte yarn with a 4.5mm hook and noted the following:
- It’s probably not a big deal, but I couldn’t pull the yarn from the centre of the ball.
- It’s easy enough to crochet with as far as cotton’s go…not overly stiff. It’s still, like most cottons, generally a bit tougher on the hands compared to using acrylics.
- The colours of the Bella Arte are nice and bright with beautiful stitch definition.
- I’m not sure why a 3mm hook is recommended. Personally I think that’s too small.
- It took approximately 40g yarn to make the swatch which is the size of a smaller dish cloth.
- The yarn only split a couple of times.
Washing
We’re all after a bit of convenience these days, so after I washed the Bella Arte swatches with a cold gentle machine cycle (including a lower than usual spin cycle), I wanted to see the results if I used the dryer.
So, the yellow swatch I dried naturally hanging over a clothes horses and the pink I put on a normal setting in the dryer. These are the results:
- So the pink swatch definitely shrank in the dryer..quite a bit!! It was 7 ¾” wide x 7½” high before I washed it and 7″ wide x 7⅛” high after. So the width of it shrank quite a bit more than the height.
- It didn’t seem to look much different except for maybe I could see a bit of creasing.
- It did seem to take longer to dry in the dryer than other cottons i’ve used also.
- It seemed soft enough and I liked the feel of it after washing and drying.
- Surprisingly, the yellow swatch of the Bella Arte yarn still shrank a little after the wash and natural dry. It was 7¼” wide x 7″ high before washing and 6⅞” x 6⅞” after.
- The appearance didn’t change at all that I could notice.
