We all love the beautiful skeins of hand-dyed yarns that we see at our favorite yarn shops or fiber shows. They can be irresistible, and I know many of us have purchased one, or maybe many more, and then used them in a project and not bene as happy with the results as were when we saw the skein. This is because skeins of hand-dyed yarns don’t tell you the whole story.
When people are shopping on the Truck, we often remind them that hand-dyed yarn skeins can lie to you. A beautiful hand-dyed yarn is typically sold in a wrapped skein like this.
In this form, you only seeing about a third of the full skein and you have no way to knowing what the colors will do ultimately when they’re worked up. There are a couple of things you can do when buying hand-dyed yarns which can help prevent this.
First and foremost, ask the dyer or store about the skein. They might have something worked up using that colorway to show you. We try to have a lot of samples just for this purpose.
Second, ask if you can see the skein unwound. This will really help you see how the colors change through the skein. Always ask the shop or dyer before you unwrap a skein, but most should have no problem opening them up for you to see. We try and do this for our online shop with the pile shots we include for all yarns.
Are the color runs long or short? Some patterns are specifically written for either long or short color changes. Short color changes will give you bursts of color when you work with them and longer ones might lend themselves well to stripes, if you are knitting something smaller like a pair of socks. Please keep in mind that self-striping yarn is something that is specifically created to stripe using lots of math and most hand-dyers I know don’t like all the extra work. If a yarn is self-striping, it will tell you on the label! Many of the variegated colors that we carry, can lend themselves to striping even though they were not specifically designed to do this.
Third and lastly, if they don’t have a full project to show you, do if they have any swatches you can see?
We have almost all of our variegated colors swatched up. When we create our swatches, we always make three. One is knit in stockinette with a garter border (to help keep it flat), one is a crochet stitch sampler going from single crochet to half double crochet to double crochet, and one is a crochet granny square. Hand-dyed yarns can definitely look different in the different crafts and also, we see differences going from rows of crochet stitches to something in the round like the granny square.
When shopping online, we know it can be hard to see a skein of yarn and be comfortable placing an order. That’s why we have a skein shot, a pile shot and for many, a shot of the swatches along with the wrapped skein. Our goal is to make shopping easy for you. And, don’t forget you can also schedule a Virtual Shopping Appointment to look at yarns. It almost feels like you’re on the Truck with Maridee shopping, just without being able to touch and feel the skeins.
Hopefully this all helps you feel more comfortable ordering from us without seeing the yarn in person!