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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I feel like I haven’t shared many knitting machine patterns lately, probably because I haven’t been using my knitting machines much lately. (I finally made space for them to live on the bookshelf in my office, and now that they have a “place” it’s almost like I forgot they existed for a while.)

But I did recently make a little cat bed, that surely would work for a small dog, too.

This one uses two different sizes of knitting machine: a larger one (it could be any in the 40-48 needle range) and a 22 pin.

The larger machine is used in flat panel mode to make the bottom pillow like part of the bed, while the smaller machine makes a long tube that is used around the edges as the sort of walls of the cat bed.

For stuffing I used a bit of leftover quilt batting for the pillow, and some cut up old T-shirts for the tube.

You can use any worsted weight yarn you like (I used two colors of Big Twist Pound+, which comes in huge skeins that weigh more than a pound). Acrylic or cotton yarn is nice for washablity, but you’ll be cranking for a while so make sure you use a yarn your machine likes so it’s not too much of a struggle.

You can grab the pattern for this cat bed over at Our Daily Craft. I’m sorry to report the pictured is as close as a cat has gotten to it so far, but maybe your cats like to be cozy more than mine do?

If you’re looking for more options for cute handmade places for your cats and little dogs to rest, check out this roundup of knit pet beds. I still want to knit one by hand but the machine version was definitely a faster option (especially good since my cats are ungrateful).

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