Yarn swatches

Anne invited me to join the Friday Photo challenge on Flickr. Every week there’s a theme and you have until Friday to take one, two or three photos and share with the group. The theme this past week was “Colours” and it was only while riding home on the train on Friday evening that I realised I’d forgotten to take a photo. And then I remembered this…

Do send away for the Pierrot yarn catalogue if you haven’t already got hold of one. When mine arrived there was a large book, which I’d though was just a catalogue, and a lovely folder with several pages of cotton yarn swatches. I’d thought that was pretty amazing, but then I opened the larger book and it had even more yarn samples, hundreds of them! Wool, alpaca, acrylic, silk, even paper!

The catalogue is all in Japanese but Pierrot include a page with translations for all the characters you’ll need to know to figure out what you’ll want to buy. Amazingly I haven’t actually bought anything yet, but I’m pretty sure The Shy Lion has (I think he might have the new version of the sample book too, mine is from 2010).

Yarn companies really should offer to sell sample cards. You can never really tell what a colour looks like until you can see it in your hands. It’s definitely worth spending a couple of dollars on a shade card to avoid a nasty surprise, like when the ten skeins of what you thought was a soft celery green turns out to be the colour of lime whiz-fizz (Rowan Summer Tweed “Sprig”, I’m looking at you).

It really doesn’t have to be anything special. I love this simple swatch card a yarn shop created for Patons Inca…

In comparison, the swatch card for Brooklyn Tweed is a small work of art. I had already got hold of the sample card for Shelter so when the new Loft yarn was released I couldn’t resist getting hold of the new swatch card with even more colours!

The names can be pretty tempting too. When we visited New York I got hold of some Peace Fleece for thick winter socks for my dad and settled on a beautiful heathered grey with  tiny flecks of white and green, even better when I noticed the colour name, “Father’s Gray”. I only resisted a jumper’s worth of “Mourning Dove” because the suitcase was already at bursting point.

I found out about the yarn from New Lanark Mills while listening to Hoxton Handmade’s Electric Sheep podcast, lovely colours and quite a bargain… (and if you don’t already have  Electric Sheep on your podcast playlist, please do pop on over to have a listen).

And speaking of bargains, let’s close with the yarn samples from our very own Bendigo Woollen Mills. Even the swatch cards are a total bargain, they’re free!