How can i stiffen yarn

NOTE: It might be slightly unpleasant to work with glue due to its slimy texture, but as a result, you will get super stiff snowflakes hard as a rock with a beautiful crochet structure that looks almost as they were made of plastic. Thank you for reading this tutorial, I hope you enjoy making your own fabric stiffener with one of these easy recipes. Leave the school glue and starch and cornstarch to school kids. I think I once made snowflake with cornstarch the dog gobbled up right away.

Looking forward to some help.. Would really appreciate a brand or the name of the product. Hi, do you mean commercial fabric stiffener? There are some links in the first paragraph of the article and also a few examples shown in the very first picture. Hope it helps. Any suggestions on getting the items straight? If snowflake, all of the edges would be equally spaced.

I always use sugar. I have a hugh amount to starch now. I have loads of snowflakes now I will crochet yours also.. I am happy to see all your different ways to starch. You are never to old to learn something new. I am 75 and I do a lot of christmas ornaments for my nieces and nephews. Thanks so much. I bring it to a boil then count to sixty then I remove it. LOL sounds silly but it has worked for me all my life and I started crocheting at 18 years old.

Thanks so much for all this info. Have been having trouble getting my snowflakes stiff enough. Will try your glue method. Thanks for this, I was wondering if the pva glue version would work if you wrapped your snowflakes around a small balloon to make a bauble then popped the balloon when they are dry? Which method would give the stiffest results and not mute the color of the thread, in your opinion. Any insight would be appreciated. Hi Melanie, I have tested all the options listed in this article and they all worked great for me, no color changes.

I think my favorite stiffening method was using gelatine. Hi I am making flower girl baskets. I first tried Mod Podge Fabric stiffener and my lace turned yellow. Hi Sharon, I have not experienced any color issues with the methods described in this article. I used white cotton thread for this experiment. Maybe you can try different methods on smaller swatches to be sure they work for the yarn you are using.

A knitter with average tension will use the suggested needle size to achieve a fabric with some elasticity and flexibility which will hold its shape.

By choosing a smaller than recommended needle this also applies for crochet , you can make your fabric far denser. This is a technique often used in patterns for toys. Use two strands of yarn instead of one. Felt your finished knit. This technique is often used in making bags. This is why, after mixing the solution well and dipping your decorations, you need to knead and squeeze the decorations, to make sure they are fully saturated with the solution.

To prepare the solution, all you need to do is mix a quantity of glue with the same quantity of water or even a bit more. As an aside, you may notice in the video that the snowflakes I stiffened with PVA glue solution rusted my pins the most not sure why, maybe the glue creates an acid environment that promotes the formation of rust — that makes sense now that I think about it.

Use the starching method until you can get some actually rustproof pins. For earrings, if you want to make them using crochet thread, use a higher concentration of PVA glue solution and rust-proof pins that you trust.

There will be a separate blog post around here on how to make earrings out of these little snowflakes. To use this solution, all you need to do is dissolve some sugar in an equal quantity of water it took me one teaspoon of sugar and one of water to soak one 3 gram snowflake.

Mix well, until the sugar is completely dissolved in the water. You may use a bit of heat, but not enough to evaporate the water. But I still did it for science! Guess what, neither stuck to the fibers. All of these solutions work because, while drying, they create hydrogen bonds with each other and with the cellulose molecules in the cotton fibers. But in acrylic there are no places to create hydrogen bonds.

Which, in practice, translates into the fact that the acrylic snowflakes did stiffen slightly, but they gave way at the slightest manipulation, as the weak bonds around the acrylic fibers are easily broken. You could just dunk your items in pure PVA glue, which means there will be stronger bonds within the item, if you manage to soak it well enough.

Or you could try acrylic varnish, the type used to finish off acrylic paintings. The major deterrent to this method is the smell.