Yarn for Rose Cardi – Still Searching

Another day, most of yesterday, was spent trying to decide on yarn for Rose Cardigan. Why do I get so obsessed with new patterns when I have so many projects, either waiting to be started or waiting to be finished, and once, I was equally obsessed by them? Don’t answer that question . . it would probably hurt my feelings. Pretend I’m normal and everyone does this!

I spent hours looking at retail yarn shops, looking at indie dyers, stash diving . . and it was time I made a decision! At one point, I had yarn for two sweaters in my cart at Etsy and the shipping was almost $60. No! That amount of yarn could have been packed into a large flat rate box and shipped within the U.S. for less than $20. I don’t mind paying a little more because it does take some of their time to pack it up and get it ready but I’m not paying three times what it should cost when just about every retail shop ships for free if I spend about 25% of what my bill with that Etsy shop was going to be.

Yesterday afternoon Vince and I were talking and I told him I wish we lived within an hour of a really good yarn shop. After I got out the smelling salts and revived him, I told him that it’s really hard sometimes choosing colors when you can’t see and feel the yarn. I probably should not have mentioned the yarn shop. You can bet he’ll be making darn sure there are no yarn shops anywhere near any potential retirement location.

I also told him that I was not going to bed until I made a decision about yarn for Rose Cardi. Partly I was planting the seed that yarn will probably be arriving next week. I sounded very desperate. Truly, you all know this is true . . I tried to find stash yarn! It’s scary, but good at the same time, to admit that I really wanted to use stash yarn and not have to order yarn.

In my stash, I had enough Madelinetosh Pashmina in three or four colors to make this cardigan. Pashmina is a bit fragile and fuzzy for my liking for a sweater that’s going to get worn a lot and I know this one will get worn a lot. I had partially enough in one color of Madelinetosh Sport so, by the end of the day yesterday, I told myself . . make one of those work somehow! The color, Firewood, is a color I absolutely love!

Back to the drawing board.

The yarn on the far right is the Firewood. I kept trying to choose colors to go with it. I kinda like the combination above, except I think Glazed Pecan is a bit orange, though it does match Firewood nicely. I have Glazed Pecan in another base and it tends to lean a bit more towards brown than towards bright gold. Then I realized, I would only need one skein of Firewood so I’d still be buying almost all the skeins Actually, if I could have moved Firewood over to the third position and found a very deep purple to go in the last position, I would have been happy enough with the combination to place an order.

Even though the pattern calls for fading of four colors, I’ll just use one color, though really . . it’s many colors!

I have six skeins of Firewood (and you all thought firewood was measured in cords!), or 1,620 yards. By the time I use some of the yarn to make a swatch, I figured I’d need nine skeins, though I could probably get by with eight because I barely need any yarn out of the 9th skein and I am going to make the sleeves a bit shorter. To me, even though the sweater is supposed to be oversized, the sleeves look sloppy long, like I’m wearing my big brother’s sweater . . but I don’t have a big brother!

I’m going to do a swatch. In my opinion, cables show up better on more solid-ish yarns so I’m not sure how they’re going to look with this yarn. I’ll get a swatch done and then see what I think. If it works, I’ll order more of this yarn. If it doesn’t work . . I’m not sure what I’ll do!