Yarn Design Tips


Tips and tricks for designing your own custom yarn at Yarnia.

Articles:



How Much Yarn Do I Need?

***Originally published May 14, 2010***Yes, this could be construed as a rhetorical question musing on the volume of my stash, but it’s also one of the most frequently asked questions here at the shop.My answer: Do you have a pattern in mind?  If you have a specific pattern in hand (or in your Ravelry queue — we can look it up for you!), determining how much you’ll need is pretty simple.Every pattern will have a section at the beginning that looks something like this — what I call the specs of the project: What you’re looking for here is the yarn they’re using in the pattern.When ...


The Yarnia Compromise

***Originally published on November 4, 2014***Here is a stellar example of the benefits that come from blending your own yarns, like we do here at Yarnia.This week, I decided to get started on this vest that I want to make for Jesse’s Christmas present.  It’s been years since I’ve made him anything, he’s a dapper guy, and though I still dutifully heed the freakishly accurate warnings about The Sweater Curse, this guy deserves a vest.I knew I had my heart set on an earthy, heathered brown — a blend of something wonderfully warm and soft, like merino/alpaca.  What I hadn’t ...


Oh Knitty, you know me too well.

***Originally published September 21st, 2012***Did you know the new Deep Fall issue of Knitty is out?  I’m super excited about this one for two reasons: one is, the Deep Fall issue is always my favorite, with tons of cold-weather projects like sweaters, scarves, hats — fun creative takes on old classic projects.But secondarily, Yarnia has an ad in this issue’s pattern pages!  It’s always the luck of the draw, which pattern your ad will get placed with, and once it’s there, they’re partnered forever.  Which is why I’m totally ecstatic that we are headlining for the ...


Why is Hemp Yarn So Great?

***Originally published October 16, 2015***A few months ago we found a wonderful new supplier for our hemp yarn, and we’ve been loving the colorful addition that it brings to our shelf of cellulose fibers, right next to the linen. Why is this natural fiber so wonderful to use in your knitting, weaving, and crochet?  The reasons are manifold: Environmental: Not only does hemp require very little water to grow plentifully, but it has very few “insect enemies,” meaning that it is can easily grow without the use of heavy pesticides.  (Cotton, on the other hand, requires h...


You can now buy metallic lurex by the cone!

***Originally published on February 12, 2014***Whoo boy, this has been a long time coming, and you all have been very patient.  You know how when you come in to the shop and ask us for metallic lurex by itself, we tell you it needs to be combined with at least one other strand so that we can wind it onto a cone?  No longer. We have found a new supplier for our lurex, who sells them on much smaller cones — which means that we can sell them to you without having to wind any off, which takes about a million years on our machine because this lurex is so thin (think 14,000+ y...


Breathe new life into your old stash

We often get customers coming in to the shop having found a steal of a bargain at an estate sale, or having visited Peru years ago and carted back pounds of laceweight alpaca yarn on cones, without any plan for it, but just because it was so cheap! But the problem is, unless you’re a weaver or a spinner, these super amazing finds might not be of much use to you, thin as they are.Unless you wind them together, to thicken them up into a knitting weight yarn. Combine your own coned yarn with itself, or add in some of our strands to bulk it up a little, or give it that extra depth of color that it...


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