Yarn - The Mother Lode

The other day I got a call from DH saying that the Hancock Fabrics in Duluth, Georgia was closing and that they had deep markdowns. The yarn was 70% off. So yesterday I went. For less than $88 I got 9 balls of Lion Suede, 23 balls of Lion Suede Prints, 8 balls of Lion Bouclé, 1 skein of Lion Homespun, 1 ball of Lion Cotton, and various other notions, crochet hooks, knitting needles, and a few things for the middle DD. By my estimation, I got about $235 worth of just yarn. I'm very pleased. :)

How to begin

The blue and green blanket to the left is the first project I've finished since I first set up the blog. It's made from Bernat Baby Coordinates. I will be giving it as a gift at a baby shower this afternoon. I really hope she likes it. I worry that the colors may be too bold. I think I've decided the Baby Coordinates is my favorite baby yarn. This is approximately the 4th major project I've done with it, along with countless minor projects with the leftover. I've used both the solids and the two tone variegated to the left. I had a gorgeous pink and purple one identical to this one that I sold recently as well. I have several recommendations with the Baby Coordinates yarn. One is that I prefer to use the Susan Bates hooks over the Boye hooks because the hooks themselves are flatter and don't seem to become entangled in the shiny silver strand of the yarn quite so often. The other is that I've found it much easier to use on patterns calling for a G/6 hook as the smaller hooks also tend to snag that silver strand more often. Try not to handle this yarn too much. I've noticed both in my work and in that of a friend that it very quickly looks over handled if you have to frog your piece too often or if you handle it to roll it into a ball before you use it. It has the best results if you work straight from the skein and don't have to undo your work too much. I noticed that this blanket, and the pink and purple one, were both coming out very symmetrical. To maintain that symmetry, I compared the end of each skein to the beginning of the next so that I started roughly where I'd left off. A couple of times this meant pulling out and cutting off quite bit of the yarn of the new skein. (I've saved what I pulled out so that I could use to to make pom-poms for the baby hats that I will make with the leftover.)