What a Life!

When it comes to handpainted yarn, I have mixed feelings. The colorways look so pretty when you shop for them online, but then you get them and they aren’t quite what you expected. Then when you knit them up, you get pooling and striping and all sorts of “effects” (rather than the colors being mixed up evenly over the knitted fabric). So generally, I then to avoid them.

However, a few months back, I fell hard for some hand-dyed yarn. It is yarn that I used to make wool diaper covers for my boys [in this case, for Joey]. It was on sale, okay? And it looked so pretty, I just had to order a couple of my favorite colorways. After all, it is my favorite yarn for wool diaper covers – it just works so much better than anything else I’ve tried.

I got the yarn, and, of course, it wasn’t quite what I had expected it to look like. So I put it away. In a dark closet where I wouldn’t see it. Joey had just upgraded to larger diapers and I had thought that would require knitting new wool. But our old wool pants fit just fine so there was no need to start knitting right away.

This weekend, I got it back out. [Actually, the real reason for getting it out was to mess around with my camera and play with the white balance settings and yarn seemed to be the perfect subject – lots of different colors to try and capture accurately and it wouldn’t run away or anything.]

The first thing I did was to re-wind it. I have two skeins of the guinness colorway here:

Which one do you like better? The one in back where all the colors are still pooled as they were when the yarn was handpainted, or the one in front where the colors are all mixed up on account of being re-wound?

I like the one in front better.

That colorway I was fairly pleased with. The other two were a lot more disappointing.

There was this one – the melissa colorway:

…and this one – the elijah colorway:

Both of them I had ordered before. You can see them knit-up here:

Shorts knit with the melissa colorway (2005):

Shorts knit with the elijah colorway (2005):

Handpainting is very much an art. Use more dye, the color is darker. Less dye, the color is lighter. You can use the same colors and yet come up with what appears to be a completely different colorway. So while I could send the yarn back and complain, a) the yarn comes from a WAHM, and while I know she is very concerned about customer satisfaction, I hate to cause her the trouble of having to exchange it, and b) quite frankly, such results are the nature of handpainted yarn, which includes handpainted yarn from other sellers as well. The only sure way to prevent such disappointments would be to order yarn where you buy the skein you see rather than buying yarn that is dyed to order (as in, dyed after you order it).

[You can go here and click on the link in the description to see the colorways (it’s a pop-up or I would link it directly) in order to get an idea of the difference between what I show above and what I was looking at when I ordered. The results the first time I ordered the yarn may be closer to what the pictures show, but in both instances, the yarn I actually got looked a little different than the yarn I saw online when I ordered. And yes, I know that with any yarn, what color it looks like online is not necessarily what it will look like when you have the yarn in your hands due to different color adjustment on monitors and such.]

After putting it away, then taking it back out and re-winding it, I must confess I liked it a lot better than I had at first. When I wind the yarn so its mixed rather than pooled, I get a better feel for how the yarn will look when it is knit up, and I just like it a lot better.

Now that I re-read post and see the colorways on their own without seeing the pictures I ordered from first, I’m really liking it. In fact, I’m worried that anyone reading this post is going to think I’m a fool for not liking it.

Ah, the joy of handpainted yarn!