Yarn Colorways

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12 Yarn Ball Types

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Interweave's article, 12 Yarn Ball Types and How to Knit with Them will clarify the confusion of the various forms yarn is marketed and their use.

Unique Fiber - Bear

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Fiber can be harvested from lots of animals, including bear.

Interweave recently reposted an article about Maxine Tyler: Official Bear Knitter.

Organizing Yarn Stash

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Look around you; do you see random skeins of yarn tucked here and there? Do you have baskets overflowing with patterns, yarn and notions? 

To organize your yarn and stop the stash creep from taking over your house, check out Lion Brand's blog post for some amazing suggestions from real Lion Brand crafters, including photos of storage ideas. The article takes you through step by step, providing plenty of tips along the way.

Get Organized! Stop Stash Creep with these helpful tips. 

There's a Knot in My Yarn!

Very Pink Knits demonstrates how to work with an unexpected knot in a skein/ball of yarn.

Spinning Yak Using Supported Longdraw

According to Stephanie Flynn-Sokolov,  "To spin yak, you will need a wheel with a very high drive wheel to whorl ratio. One way to achieve this is with a very big drive wheel. Down fibers like camel, yak and bison yearn to be spun longdraw. The supported longdraw seems to work best for me. Using this drafting technique may require some practice if your default drafting is a short draw, forward or back. After attaching the fiber to your leader you will be gently controlling the twist with your forward hand. Your fiber supply hand cups the fiber while allowing a small amount of fiber between your thumb and forefinger. Since the fiber is fine, we will be spinning a fine yarn, and since the fiber is so short the drafting triangle is microscopic in comparison to a medium weight wool yarn. In the drafting triangle your fiber supply turns into yarn, so the more fiber you feed in, the heavier your yarn. Pull your fiber supply hand away from your forward hand while using your forward hand like a stop gate to open, shut, twist and untwist the twist between your hands allowing only enough twist through to twist those tiny fiber in the triangle between your forefinger and thumb on your fiber supply hand. Then treadle, open the front hand finger and thumb and let the yarn draw on."

More information on spinning with Yak can be found on the Schacht Spindle Company blog.

Yarn Balls

Adding some splashes of color to your winter is as easy as creating some airy "yarn balls" to place in a basket or simply arrange on the table.

Sally Reese explains the easy process on P&G everyday.

Patterns for Mini Skeins

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Mini skeins kits are currently popular, but how can they be used?

Over the Rainbow complied patterns on Ravelry in a Favorites board called "Fade" that may provide just the inspiration you need.

What Do You Call That Color?

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Over the Rainbow Yarn's post on yarn colors (solid, semi-solid, marled, heathered, etc.) gives specific information on each type of colored yarn so you can achieve the look you want for your projects.

Spinning Heather & Tweed Yarn

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Jillian Moreno, editor of Knittyspin, discusses and illustrates the difference between Heather and Tweed yarn in the Knittyspin Deep Fall 2017 article: Heather or Tweed.  

Create Gradient Yarn w/o Spinning

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Yes, it's possible for non-spinners to create a gradient yarn.

Check out the tutorial on the Louet blog post: Make a Custom Gradient Yarn 

Pingora Yarns

Carrie J. (owner of Pingora Yarns)
Lander, WY
October 2017

Guild member, Carrie J. opened Pingora Yarns in Lander, WY in early October and will be hosting a Grand Opening on Saturday,  October 28, 2017 from 11 AM - 2 PM.  The shop is located at 153 North 4th Street, Lander, WY.

Carrie has stocked the store with a nice selection of natural fibers - many from the Rocky Mountain region.

large display room filled with colorful yarn

The rooms of the shop are filled with well organized displays of yarn (various weights) and knit samples.

Tags clipped to the samples give pattern information. 

bulky yarn in a wide range of colors

yarn on the wall pegs are from the Rocky Mountain region

needles and hooks in many sizes and types

notions for knitters and crocheters

The shop has good lighting and a couple of chairs to sit and knit or crochet. A good-sized classroom is also available: check Carrie's website for a calendar of events.

Plans are being made for the shop's tree to be
yarn bombed. Ask Carrie how you can be a part of
the project. 

Weigh & Estimate Yarn

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Sometimes you need to know if you have enough yarn leftover to either complete a project or make more of something — like a second sock or mitten. You could roll the working yarn off the ball and measure it as you roll it, but that’s time-consuming and really annoying. 

Instead grab a food or postal scale and weigh the yarn. It’s the easiest way to figure out how much yarn you have left. It’s also a fantastic method to make sure you have enough yarn when you’re trying to work from your stash.

Craftsy explains the easy steps in this post. 

Yarn Organization

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Finding it difficult to identify scrap yarn because the ball bands have been misplaced? Kathleen Berlew has a solution you might find helpful: printable yarn organizer cards. Her design is nothing fancy, but it does have space for all the information you might want to keep on file about the yarn in your stash--name, color, fiber content, weight/yardage, needle/hook size, and yarn weight (4 for worsted, 6 for super-bulky, etc).

Her free, printable organizer cards can be found here.

Adding Twist to Splitty Yarns

If you're finding it difficult to work without splitting stitches, it might be worth changing the direction that you wrap the yarn around the needle. It's not quite that straightforward: if you switch to wrapping the yarn anti-clockwise (as in the Eastern style) then you also have to knit into the back of those stitches when you come to work them to avoid making twisted stitches.

Learn more about this technique on YarnSub

3,000 year old yarn

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The ball of yarn shown at left is 3,000 years old. For much of its existence, it has been buried underground, in boggy land, along with the rest of the remains of three small houses built millennia ago, near what’s now Cambridge, England.

Ever since archaeologists discovered Must Farm, which has been called Britain’s Pompeii, they have been uncovering small clues as to what life was like for the families that lived here. This ball of yarn is one of the most delicate finds–extraordinary in its survival over all these years.

In the week since the yarn was first found (July 2016) the team has carefully cleaned it up. “Excavating and cleaning artifact this fragile is not easy but seeing them up close like this really shows how remarkable these finds are,” the team wrote on their Facebook page.

Calculating Remaining Yards in a Skein

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Kate P. asked a question at the May guild meeting about determining the amount of yarn necessary for a second sock.

Interweave Yarn Hacks prepared a tutorial in a recent post that answers the question.

Calculate the Remaining Yards in a Skein

Intentional Pooling

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"Self-striping, self-patterning, speckled and otherwise colored yarns are really popular right now, and the interesting thing about some of these yarns is that they can look quite different depending on the size needles you use, the gauge you’re getting, how many stitches you work per row or round or whether you are working flat or in the round.

I generally think of pooling — where a particular color lines up on different rows, making a blotch or pool of the same color on the knit fabric — as a bad thing, but you can do really cool things with pooling if you are intentional about it.

Marly Bird has been doing a lot lately with planned pooling in crochet, but the same kind of thing works in knitting, too.

Crafty Crusader wrote a post a while back about using planned pooling in a hat project, which pointed me to the Planned Pooling website. This site allows you to plug in colors and note how many stitches are worked in each color as well as how many stitches are in a row and whether it’s worked flat or in the round.

This allows you to see what a knit up swatch or garment would look like, and you can play with the numbers to get different effects."  ~ Sarah White, Craft Gossip site

Eco-Friendly Fibers - a review

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Interweave knows that we all want to do our part to lessen our impact on the environment. Choosing yarns made of organic, natural wools and other fibers is one way for knitters to do that. These yarns do not utilize any pesticides or chemicals throughout the life of production, all the way from what the sheep eat or how a plant is grown to the material with which the yarn is dyed.

Interweave reviewed a handful of high-quality, certified organic yarns in this post. 

Yarn Joins

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The Yarn Sub website offers ten methods of joining yarn.

Why know try all of the methods and find one you like best.