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.
It’s actually really fun to play with and makes me want to try my own planned pooling project soon.
Have you ever played with planned pooling or had something unintentionally cool come up when you worked with a self-striping yarn? I’d love to hear about it.
[Photo: Crafty Crusader.]
I have never done it, but think it is really cool, and I really like the picture you posted.
I had a variegated teal cotton yarn from Hobby Lobby that I crocheted into a dishcloth using an extended single crochet stitch. It made an X on the dishcloth. I made 2 with that skein, which turned out the same. I couldn’t duplicate it later to save my life, but years later I found some planned pooling videos on youtube and yes, Marly Bird. I’ve not tried it with knitting yet, but would like to do that sometime, too.