Mad Mad me

Each card contains the brand, color and weight of yarn. The yarn is just wrapped around and knotted on the back side. No tape or glue was used.

When I go to a yarn store, any yarn store, I make my decisions on color above all else. For some it’s the fibers, weight, sheen, ply, fuzziness, softness, etc, etc.. (Softness is my second favorite attribute of yarn). But overall, it’s color that will control my choice. And honestly, I think it was the rainbow in a yarn aisle that convinced me as a little girl, I needed to learn to crochet like Mom and Auntie.

Over the years of buying yarn and being given yarn, I’ve collected quite a bit of variety, in every attribute, but when it comes to making a project, I stand in front of my own stash and say “What colors shall I combine today?”. As many of you know, my favorite yarn is Caron Simply Soft and I just did a personal inventory… I’ve got 37 colors (out of the 56 in the line) and though some are partial skeins, I will just replenish when I run out. As you know, the stores never carry a full line of any one yarn, so we consumers never really know what we are missing out on. My advice? Get online and look around, you’d be surprised at how expansive some of these yarn brands really are.

This in store limitation has driven me to do crazy things. The last time I wanted to bulk up my stash so that I really had a “rainbow” option, I compromised. I bought great colors, but from a variety of yarns (some not very soft) just to fill in the gaps of color. I made lots of small projects and flowers with these yarns but never really hit a stride, and many of them just don’t work together. They say they are all “4″ weight, but some are considerably thicker than others which makes them difficult to use in a pattern together. Darn!

What’s a girl to do? Make a scrap blanket, choose a pattern and stitch that will not highlight the weight differences and move on. That is precisely how the Mad Rainbows and Fiction blanket was born… But since I made it, I’ve had tons of requests for a list of the yarns and colors used and I’m sorry to say, I cannot provide that since this truly was a scrap blanket, partial skeins only and from a variety of different manufacturers. So here’s my solution… I’m going to make it again, using nothing but Caron Simply Soft (or compatible) yarns. I’m figuring out which would be the best substitute colors (many of the colors were Caron SS in the first place, so I’m only replacing about 1/2 of them). And I’m working on a pattern with photos about the Bavarian/Wool Eater stitch. It should be glorious when it’s done, but with so much yarn to weed through, I got lost in my own stash. I decided to make a color sampler of Caron SS so that I could plan this project and all future projects to a perfect tee. No more guessing what matches what or standing in the store trying to remember just the shade of yellow I used last time. Kiss those days goodbye!

Here’s the new helper I created, it’s a yarn sampler with all the colors I have of Caron SS. And as I get more, I’ll add more cards until I really know what they have to offer. I used a set of prepunched “memory” flash cards from the school supply section of a department store. They came prepunched and on a small ring. I’m going to make another ring that holds samples from other favorites. This will make planning projects and designing patterns a joy! (and I’ll save a lot of time so I’ll have more to waste doing something else…).

Above is an updated photo, I’ve added quite a bit of yarn to it and I’m still adding. The cards on the small ring, are my final choices on colors to recreate the Rainbow and Fiction Blanket entirely with compatible yarns.  8-22-2012