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Tips for Picking the Right Color Yarn for Your Project

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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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Pumpkin Knitting Patterns

There are so many great pumpkin knitting patterns out there, and it looks like I haven’t done a roundup of pumpkin knitting patterns in a few years, so it’s high time for another one.

The Lancaster Pumpkins from Cuddle Bunny Knits on Etsy are classic, made with stockinette stitch in the round and using super bulky yarn. If you’ve never knit a pumpkin before, this is a good place to start.

Jazz it up a little bit by knitting ribbing instead of straight stockinette, which gives your knit pumpkin a little more texture, too. This one is form Jessies Knits on Etsy. This one is worked flat on straight needles and there are three size options to choose from.

Or try the Pumpkin Patch pattern from Blue Sky Fibers, which is a free pattern on Ravelry. It’s worked with two strands of worsted weight yarn held together to give your pumpkins a marled look, or you can keep it solid. 

There’s another free ribbed pumpkin knitting pattern at Yarnspirations that is really cute. These are knit flat and seamed, and they come in three different sizes. You can either stack them as a centerpiece to decorate a table or you can leave them separate. Or make a whole pumpkin patch and do some of both! I love that they chose unconventional colors so you can see you don’t have to be limited to orange when you knit up your pumpkins.

Made by Devrie on Etsy has these cute pumpkins with twisted stitches (they look like cables but it’s only moving one stitch at a time) that you can make in any size with any yarn you like.

The Twisted Heart Pumpkin for Etsy seller Percival Makes Things uses cables to make a heart shape on the side of the pumpkin. It’s worked in the round and the cable pattern is charted.

And while I was really sticking to plain pumpkins here, not knit jack o’lanterns, I can’t resist sharing this beaded jack o’lantern knitting pattern from Knit Cole Studio on Etsy. The base pumpkin is simple Stockinette and you can stitch on beads in whatever design you like to make your face, or keep it plain.

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