A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you the Knitting Rule of Thirds, a quick technique that’s great for visualising how a yarn’s colours will work up in your knitting.  Understanding how to do it turns you into a little bit of a skein-reading ninja.  You can open up any yarn, quickly scan the colourway, and immediately get a solid idea of how the colour repeats are going to behave.  Go you!

So, now you’ve bought that skein and brought it home, and it’s time to find a pattern and cast on.  Whoa, there!  Not so fast!  If you love this yarn — if you really, really love it and you want your project to look a-maz-ing — there’s one more step that you’ll want to take to make sure you’re doing this beautiful colourway right…

Swatching — But Not for the Usual Reason!

Yeahhhh, I know.  You read the word “swatching” and groaned.  Nobody likes to swatch and we’ve all read those notices at the start of patterns that nag us to “take time to check gauge!”  But when it comes to hand-dyed and variegated yarns, swatching tells you a lot more than just your stitches per inch.   Let me walk you through four more reasons to swatch your hand-dyed yarn…

Reason 1:  To Check Your Personal Rule of Thirds

As I explained in my last post, the length of your yarn knitted up is generally around a third of the length of your yarn laid out straight.  This means that, as you look at your opened-up skein, you know that each colour repeat will actually be about  one third as long in the final knitted fabric.

But, we all know that every knitter’s gauge is different so, depending on the thickness of the yarn, the size of your needles, and whether you knit tightly or loosely, your “rule” might actually work out something other than thirds.  You may knit to a Rule of Fourths, or a Rule of Two-and-a-Halves …or something else entirely.

Knowing your personal rule will help you to better visualise how this colourway will work in your pattern.  You’ll know whether that small section of purple will be a little streak or just a tiny pop.  And you’ll know if the long sections of yellow are going to stretch out too far or look just right.

And if you want to avoid pooling (or you want to encourage it!), knowing your own Rule of Thirds for this particular yarn allows you do the calculations you need to get effect you want.

Reason 2:  To Check for Pseudo-Striping

Some variegated colourways are do something that I call “pseudo-striping”.  Now, I’m not talking about self-striping yarn — that’s a completely intentional effect achieved through a special dyeing technique.  Pseudo-striping happens when you have very long (and usually simple) colour repeats knitted into a very plain stitch (such as stockinette).  When those two things come together, the repeats can start to stack on top of one another in a way that creates long pools of colour that look a little like stripes.  Take a look at the shrug below to see what I mean.  In truth, these aren’t really stripes (if you look, they actually change colour across the length of the row) but they give that impression nonetheless.

Now, I happen to love this effect but, if it’s not what you’re after, swatching gives you the chance to spot it and make changes before you commit to a pattern.

The easiest way to avoid pseudo-stripes is to go for stitchwork that break up the horizontal stretch of those colours.  Stitch patterns with slipped stitches, yarnovers, or cables (faux or real) will do work wonders (see how the striping seems to disappear in the center lace section of that shrug above?).  Even garter stitch can do the trick, because of the way it hides every other row.  And the only way to find out is to get your needles out and swatch!

Reason 3:  To Check for Clown Barf

“Clown Barf” is the knitted result of those yarns that have sooooo many different colours going on at once that it just doesn’t work.  Usually (but not always) in rainbow colourways, they look simply amazing in the skein but somehow end up bitty and jumbled and just too-crazy once they’re off the needles.  But the thing is, it can be hard to tell which skeins will turn into clown barf.  Sometimes the ones you think will, don’t…  and the ones you think won’t, do.

The answer is swatching.  Get that yarn on your needles and see how the colours are going to redistribute themselves.  You’ll know pretty quickly if what you’ve got is clown barf.  And if it is, what do you do?  First, don’t despair!  The solution is simple: choose a pattern with stripes, and alternate your crazy-coloured yarn with a semi-solid in a coordinating colouway.  The stripes will break up your variegated before the colours reach critical mass, allowing the semi-solid sections to turn each variegated stripe into a fabulous pop of colour — instead of an all-over assault on your senses.

Reason 4: To Check for Colourfastness

You know that when you knit a swatch in order to check your gauge, you have to wet and block it as you would the final finished object.  That’s what ensures your gauge is really accurate for the garment you’ll ultimately be wearing.

But wetting your swatch is also important because it gives you a heads up if your yarn isn’t actually colourfast.  Now, most yarns are colourfast, be they commercially dyed or hand-dyed, but if you happen to get a rare one that isn’t, that’s not something you want to find out after you’ve spent 40+ hours knitting your masterpiece!

Sometimes folks are under the impression that hand-dyed yarns are more prone to colourfastness issues, but they are not.  Any good hand-dyed yarn from a reputable dyer will be just as colourfast as any commercially dyed yarn.  At SpaceCadet, we carefully soak and rinse every one of our skeins to check for dye run-off.  On the very rare occasion that any dye comes out, the yarn goes immediately back to dye room.  I’m not happy until the rinse water runs crystal clear.

But mistakes happen — for hand-dyers and commercial outfits alike.  A few years ago, a friend made a blanket in navy blue and white stripes out of a very well known commercial yarn (a brand so popular that you’ve probably used it yourself).  When she bound off and finally washed the finished blanket, the navy bled all over the white.   …And she was heart broken!

But she had a few skeins left over that she still wanted to use, and so she asked me if I could try to set the dye on them again.   When I set the skeins to soak in clear water, the navy started pouring out in billowing clouds of blue.  After a few moments, the  water was so dark I couldn’t even see the yarn anymore.  In all honesty, I imagined there had be some sort of advanced-chemistry reason that the dye hadn’t set — something too technical for me to understand — but I went through my regular process anyway and treated the yarn exactly as I treat my own skeins.

And when I rinsed it afterwards…    the water ran clear!  My friend knit the rest of her skeins safe in the knowledge that this project wouldn’t be ruined.  And I learned that any yarn — from dye houses large or small — can end up with colourfastness issues if the yarn is not checked properly during rinsing.

But test-wetting your swatch will let you know if that’s going to be a problem, long before you cast on your project — and save you from some serious heartache if it is.

So… Swatching Really IS Worth the Effort!

There you go — even though it’s a pain and even though we all really want to cast on right now, when it comes to hand-dyed and variegated yarns, nothing beats swatching for really making the most of your colourway.  There’s so much more to it than just getting gauge!

So, now it’s your turn.  Have you tried swatching for all these different reasons?  Or are some of them new to you?  Did swatching improve your results with your hand-dyed yarn?  Or are you so devil-may-care that you just cast on and let the yarn do whatever it wants?  Come over to the SpaceCadet Ravelry group and share your experience!

The InterStellar Yarn Alliance is Open for Subscriptions!

Want to come with SpaceCadet on a colour adventure?  That’s exactly what the Yarn Alliance is all about!

The InterStellar Yarn Alliance is your a chance to dive into amazing exclusive SpaceCadet colourways and share it with a fabulous community of folks who are just as excited as you are!

Subscriptions available from Sept 9-24 ONLY

Click here to grab your spot!

So, what do you get when you join?

…beautiful yarns, colourways you might never have dared try but suddenly realise you love, and some seriously fabulous gifts!

As a member of the InterStellar Yarn Alliance, you’ll receive a fabulous parcel delivered to their door every other month, containing:

• SpaceCadet ^® yarn (light to medium weight) in an exclusive Yarn Alliance colourway (guaranteed not to be offered on the SpaceCadet^® website for at least 6 months)
• A great Yarn Alliance gift tucked into every parcel!
• The SpaceCadet’s Log exploring the inspiration for each colourway.
• The InterStellar Yarn Alliance newsletter with periodic special offers exclusively for members.
• A 15% off coupon every six months
• And your entry to an awesome community of club members who share pattern ideas, cheer you on, and make our activities so much fun!

Plus Get a Coordinating Colourway!

Colours this gorgeous deserve companions, don’t you think? So each month, you have the opportunity to get a second colourway that we design to coordinate beautifully with the first, so you can create an even more amazing project. Usually a semi-solid or a gently variegated, you can use it to create stripes, a contrasting panel, or to go where-ever your creativity takes you!

And Sweater Quantities!

One gorgeous skein just isn’t enough? You also have an exclusive opportunity to order more skeins custom-dyed in the latest club colourway. You’ll receive an email with all the details about a week after your parcel goes out — and then all you have to do is pick your project!

We’d love to have you aboard!  Click here now to get your spot in the Yarn Alliance!

If you’ve been following my series on understanding hand-dyed yarn, you know by now that the most important step is to open your skein up, and you know the basics of how to read your colour repeats, and you can twist your skein back up like a pro.  So far, so good!

And today I’m going to share a second step in reading your colour repeats — one that gives you a really handy benchmark that you can use to very quickly visualise how those colours will work up in your knitting.  So if you’re holding an open skein in our booth at a show (or maybe at your LYS, — just don’t forget to check it’s ok to open it), and you’re looking for all the colours that might be hidden inside the twist, assessing whether the yarn has got mostly long repeats or short, there’s one simple rule you want to keep in mind…

The Rule of Thirds

Actually, I totally made that rule up.  The real rule of thirds is a photography term, meaning that photographs are usually more dynamic if you place the subject slightly off-center, a third of the way in from one of the edges.  But the idea of thirds is a real thing when it comes to knitting as well and it’s this:

The length of your yarn knitted up is generally around a third of the length of your yarn laid out straight.

To illustrate this, I grabbed a random leftover Mini-Skein that has some very distinct colour repeats and knitted up a quick swatch.  As I did so, I measured the colour repeats before they reached my needles, and then I measured them again in the knitting after I’d soaked and blocked the swatch.  Here, have a look at what happens with the bright blue section of the colourway:

This is Oriana, a fingering yarn, knit on 3mm needles (somewhere between a US 2-3).  Stretched out, the bright blue section of yarn is roughly around 9 centimeters long.  Knitted up into stockinette stitch, the same blue section measured around 3 centimeters.  The Rule of Thirds holds true!

What does this mean for you, holding your open skein of yarn in a show booth or a shop?  It means you can very quickly look at the colour repeats and, by imagining them at a third of the length you see in the skein, have a basic-but-reliable idea of how they’ll work up in your knitting!  And once you get in the habit, it becomes second-nature — at just a moment’s glance you can pretty accurately “see” your colourway knitted up.  I find it super-helpful when I’m quickly sorting through skeins of hand-dyed to find one that will work with a pattern I have in mind.

Guidelines and Caveats and Disclaimers

Now, you need to know that, just like all simple rules, there’s actually much more to it.  The knitted length of your yarn will of course depend on your particular gauge, the needles you choose, your stitch pattern, and lots of other variables.  The Rule of Thirds applies best when you:

• choose a needle size that is traditionally recommended for the weight of your yarn — so smaller needles for lighter yarns and larger needles for heavier yarns (click here for the Craft Yarn Council’s recommendations).
• work in stockinette stitch — as soon as you introduce more complicated stitches, you alter the amount of yarn that’s used and start to move away from simple thirds.
• And while this rule is handy for knitting, it doesn’t really apply to crochet at all (I’m sorry, crocheters!)

Establishing Your Own Rule

Ok, so what do you do if your gauge isn’t “typical”?  Or you want to knit fingering on size 10 needles?  Or your stitch pattern has a bunch of slipped-stitch-cabled-yarnovers (go you!)?  Or you crochet?  Well, there’s a few things you can do to adapt this rule to your situation.

The first is knit a gauge swatch in stockinette, measuring as you go just like I did, and see what your personal rule is for your own natural gauge.  Check and see if you naturally knit to the Rule of Thirds.  Or maybe you knit more to a Rule of Fourths… or Two-and-a-Halves…  or something else.  It doesn’t really matter what your natural gauge is, so long as you know it and have it in mind when you open up a skein of hand-dyed and start looking at the colour repeats.

And that applies to crocheters as well — go grab a skein of distinctly variegated yarn and work up a swatch in whatever stitch you most often use.  Measure the colour repeats before they reach your hook, and then measure how far they go across your stitches once you’ve crocheted them into the swatch.  You can even test it over a couple of different stitches.  Once you have your measurements, you’ll know what your personal rule is for reading your hand-dyed yarn.

Ok, but what if your pattern isn’t in stockinette?  Well, that’s a little trickier.  If you already own the yarn, then you just knit a swatch in the stitch pattern and see how it works with the yarn’s variegation.  But if you’re on the hunt for the right yarn and really want to know exactly what your Rule will be for that stitch pattern, then the best thing is to knit the pattern in a test yarn — measuring length as you go — and then use that knowledge to establish your Rule of Thirds/Fourths/Whatever so you can go out and read colour repeats to find the right yarn for your pattern.

Now It’s Your Turn!

Now that you know about the Rule of Thirds, you can start applying it right away!  (Even if your personal rule is not quite thirds, it’s still going to be fairly close).  So go into your stash of variegated hand-dyed yarns and start exploring.  Open up a few skeins and see if you can imagine how the colours will work together when they’re a third of the length in the skein.  Grab some of your Mini-Skeins and cast on a few quick swatches to see the colours worked up.  Compare long repeats against short repeats.  And look for those tiny pops of colour (like the yellow in the images above) to see how they work up as well.

Once you have the Rule of Thirds in your head, reading your skeins takes on a whole new dimension.  I’d love to hear how it helps you understand those beautiful, seductive, and sometimes intimidating hand-dyed colourways!

A few weeks ago, I shared the importance of untwisting your skeins in order to understand how the colourway will behave.  When it comes to hand-dyed yarn, seeing the whole colourway is absolutely crucial.  And the feedback I got on that was wonderful!  But one question I got again and again was, “How do I twist my skein back up again so it looks like it did before?”

Twisting a skein is really very simple but the reason people get hung up on it is because it takes practice.  Just like learning to knit, twisting up a skein feels downright awkward the first time (or two… or three..) that you do it.  But keep at it and, before you know it, your fingers will develop a little muscle memory and you’ll be twisting up skeins like nobody’s business.

And, just like knitting, it’s a really hard thing to describe with words, so we’ve put together a quick video to show you how it’s done.  Before you watch it, though, here are a few pointers that might help the next time you feel like you’re twisting your yarn into a big knot instead of a pretty skein…

Tips for Retwisting a Skein of Yarn

1. Put both hands in the skein and pull it good and tight before you start twisting.  Unless it’s something really delicate, like laceweight, it’s ok to give it a nice thwack.
2. Make sure the tag or a choke-tie is at the center of the skein.  That comes in handy when you’re start folding the two ends together.
3. Twist using one or two fingers and get it tight.  I always go until my fingers are just starting to complain a little, and then I know I’ve got the skein twisted tightly enough.
4. When you catch the middle between your knees (or on your elbow, or whatever works), that extra tightness is what makes it twist back on itself.
5. Once you’ve folded the one end over the other, you might find it still doesn’t look very neat.  If it’s bunching up, pull the twist manually along one side of the skein so the tension evens out.
6. If you have a few stragglers or choke-ties sticking out just a little, it’s ok to tuck them into the twist.

Want to see it in action?  Here you go!

(Can’t see the video? Click here)

Oh, two other quick things…

• On untwisting skeins: Just remember, if you don’t (yet) own the skein, it’s always polite to ask before you untwist.
• On twisting skeins: One thing I learned from writing that blog post a couple of weeks ago is how many people thought our skeins are twisted by machine.  Nope, they are hand-twisted!  Every. single. one.  In fact, I don’t know any  indie dyer who uses a machine to twist their skeins.  When you buy hand-dyed, it really is all made by hand! 🙂

Last week, I gave you the first and most important step to understanding your skein of hand-dyed yarn: opening it up.  And because we’re constantly twisting and untwisting skeins here in the studio, it seems like a really simple step to me, but I know from our experiences at yarn festivals and trunk shows that it is something a lot of people are reluctant to do.  But when it comes to hand-dyed yarn, there’s simply no better way to really understand what you’re going to be knitting or crocheting with than opening it up and having a good look.

So now, with that first step taken, what are you looking for?  What’s the magic inside the skein that will tell you how the colourway will behave?  There are several things to look for and today I’m going to cover the most important: the length of the colour repeats.

What are Colour Repeats?

Because hand-dyed yarn is usually dyed in the skein with the yarn looping around in circle, the colour we apply to each area of the skein hits all (or at least several) of the strands at that point in the circle.  When you are knitting or crocheting with it, the colours will repeat as you work your way around the circle again and again.  Each change of colour is refered to as a colour repeat, and its the length of these repeats that are so important to understanding how a hand-dyed colourway will behave.

Bonus info: the exception to this is single-skein gradients.  These are dyed using a different technique that makes the colour change slowly from one end of the skein to another.  So while the colours don’t repeat the way they do in most hand-dyed yarns, the colour changes are still referred to as colour repeats.

What about Semi-Solid Colourways?

For the most part, colour repeats apply to variegated and tonal yarns more than semi-solids, because they contain multiple colours that play off each other.  But where this does apply to semi-solid skeins is in the variation of the depth of shade — the yarn will have taken the colour more intensely in some sections of the loop than in others.  Think of those as colour repeats and you’ll get a better understanding of your semi-solid too. (Need a refresher on semi-solids vs solids? Click here)

There are several types of colour repeats that you’re looking for: long repeats, short repeats, and pops of colour.  So open up your skein of hand-dyed yarn, lay it out so you can view the whole loop, and let’s see what we’ve got!

Long Repeats

There’s no objective measure of what qualifies as a long repeat, but I’d say anything that is a third of the loop or longer counts.  Long repeats often stretch to one whole side of the skein (so, covering half the yarn) or sometimes even as much as three-quarters or more.    A skein can have a single long repeat of just one colour, or it may have several colours that each are long repeats, and those can also be intermixed with short repeats as well.  Take a look at this skein in our colourway “Flow“.  Though it has some shorter splotches of colour, the underlying green section is a very long repeat — stretching to well over half the skein.

The longer the repeat, the more it will stretch out in your knitting, forming a long line of colour.  Depending on the diameter of the item you’re making, that could begin to look like stripes, either where the colour stacks row on row, or where it pools more on one side than the other.  This shrug below is a great example.

But here’s something interesting — do you see how the “striping” seems to disappear in the lace panel running down the center?  Where plain stitches like stockinette allow longer repeats to stretch out, patterns that contain more complicated stitches such as yarn overs and slipped stitches break up those longer colours and can help to even them out.

Crochet does very different things with variegated yarns and their colour repeats, because crochet moves the yarn both vertically as well as horizontally.  So it won’t necessarily stretch the colour out the way knitting can but, regardless, the longer the repeat, the larger that section of colour will be within the stitch pattern.

Short Repeats

Again, there’s no one measure of what qualifies as a short repeat, but I’d call any colour section that stretches for less than a quarter of a skein’s loop as a short repeat.  Sometimes those smaller sections appear evenly across the whole skein, as in our colourway “Blood Moon“, and sometimes they appear only here and there, like the green in “Vortex“.  Sometimes they blend gently into the next colour, and sometimes they have clearer edges.

But regardless of how they’re laid out, colour in a short repeat is not going to last long across your stitches before it switches again to the next colour.  When those changes happen evenly or frequently, the resulting fabric often comes out with watercolour-y effect.  When it happens just a few times in a skein, the result can be either pops of a contrasting colour or, as with the orange section of our colourway “Headstrong“, a heathered effect.

Pops of Colour

When you have really little sections of colour in a skein, these are what I think of as “pops”.  In truth, they’re just short colour repeats like the ones above, but they’re much much smaller, meaning the colour won’t last more than a few stitches when you work it up.  Whether they’re in a contrasting colour or a coordinating shade, the effect can be spectacular.

Scroll back up to the picture of our colourway “Vortex” and check out the little sections of magenta — those are a great example of a pop of colour.  Or look at the quick splashes of black in “Tantrum” below.  Colour pops like these can make your stitches super-interesting and your final project really eye-catching.

On Your Way To Reading Your Skein!

Now it’s your turn!  Go grab a skein from your stash, open it up, and look at the repeats. Does it have a few predominant shades that span most of the skein?  Or are there lots of short bursts of colour?  Do you see little pops?  Being able to look at your skein and identify the colour repeats is such a help to understanding how the colourway will work in your knitting and crocheting!   Whether they a long repeats, short repeats, pops of colour, or a combination of all three, each hand-dyed skein is unique and the only way to understand it is…  to open it up and see what you’ve got!

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Want to come with SpaceCadet on a colour adventure?  That’s exactly what the InterStellar Yarn Alliance is all about!

Join our premier yarn club to come with us as we explore the furthest reaches of colour — in gorgeous yarns dyed in exclusive colours that you can’t get enough of, and shared with a wonderful community of fellow club members who are all part of the adventure too.  Plus beautiful coordinating skeins, our awesome club gifts, and a 15% coupon.

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