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Birthday Surprises from Cotton Clouds

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cotton clouds birthday saleIrene of Cotton Clouds Mail Order Yarns is celebrating her birthday this week and buyers will get the surprises. Now on her website there’s a range of gift packages available to choose from, ranging from a $50 value package going for $45 to a $1,000 value package now going for $550. (Despite the shop’s name, it does not sell only cotton yarns.)

You choose what craft you’ll be using the yarn for, whether you’d prefer skeins, cones or a mix and what color range you’d and Irene will do the rest. She’s also throwing in some free patterns and other goodies.

Have you ever ordered yarn grab-bag style? I’ve done it a few times and it’s an interesting challenge to try to use the yarn sometimes! But it’s also fun to have the surprise of not knot what you’re going to get.

Agree? Disagree? Spill it!

[Photo by Cotton Clouds.]

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Tips for Picking the Right Color Yarn for Your Project

I have never been all that picky about the colors I use in knitting projects. When choosing colors for projects to go in my books, I try to pick colors that go together in individual projects and also to use a variety of colors among the projects in the book, so while I love blue and green I make sure to throw in orange and yellow as well, for example.

When knitting projects for myself I’m usually using stash so whatever I have is good enough. Or if I do happen to be buying yarn for a project, it’s usually more about the texture or fiber content of the yarn first, then choosing a color I like, rather than having a color in mind then finding a yarn with that in its line.

Marie at Olive Knits was looking for the perfect green yarn to replace a store bought sweater, and she found that picking out exactly the right shade was trickier than she expected.

She wrote a blog post full of tips for finding the right yarn when you’re looking for a particular color.

I think the hardest part of this these days is that we tend to do so much online shopping for yarn, either because we don’t have a local yarn store, we can’t get what we want locally or we want to support independent makers who live elsewhere. And if you’ve ever received yarn that isn’t quite the color you were expecting you know what I’m talking about.

One of her tips, then, is to look at a color swatch for the yarn you’re thinking about buying on every monitor or device you have available because it probably will look different on different screens (and maybe different still in person, and under different lighting conditions, or if you use it in a project with other colors…).

Check out her post for more tips on finding the right color for your project.

[Photo: Olive Knits.]

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