How to Choose Your Colors

Buying our hand-dyes online

 Many people who shop for hand-dyed yarn understand the hand-made nature of the process, the unique variability and beauty of the product, and enjoy the slight mystery of ordering online. We think all our yarn is beautiful of course but ordering online is different than seeing a color in person.

We strive to represent our yarn as close to it appears in real life, via our rich online photos. However, colors can appear very differently on different monitors and devices, and differently in real life and with different lighting (artificial vs. natural) so here is some information that may help you make your choices.

• We specialize in semi-solid and monochromatic colorways. This does not mean your yarn is a solid color. In fact, many colors go into most of our colorways. So you will find, with a number of the yarns, glimpses of other colors, tones, highlights and lowlights. In our color descriptions we try to point these out so you may see phrases like “a blue with hints of pink” or a “red with an orange undertone.” Please pay close attention to these descriptions as they indicate what you are going to see in real life, even if you can’t see it in the online photo.
• Each skein is hand-dyed and has light and dark variegation. In some yarns, the variegation is more obvious than in others, due to fiber content. Even if you can’t see it on line, most skeins will have areas of dark and light and this is the natural and beautiful outcome of hand-dyeing. If you need a totally solid yarn for a particular project, a hand-dyed product is probably not the right choice.  Here is a list of our yarns in the order of variegation level from most to least:
  • Mitten Wool
  • BAM Thick
  • Sparkle Sock/Twinkle Toes
  • Sock
  • Low-Cal Worsted
  • Half and Half
  • Sparkle Silk
• Our most variable colorways are the following. Please keep this in mind when ordering. They are some of our most popular and most interesting but they are also complex in nature and reveal more colors than our sem-solids...even if that’s not obvious in the online photo. When ordering these colors we HIGHLY recommend you make sure you order enough for your project as dye lots will be more different with these colors than with some of the others, and are difficult to re-order to "match":              
  • Beach Plum
  • Palomino
  • Mascara
• Anything with the name “sparkle” in the title has a small amount of Stellina, a synthetic fiber that adds a very subtle silver sparkle to the yarn. Any of our yarns with silk in them have a slight sheen that reflects the light differently, as you would expect with silk fabrics. The higher the silk content, the stronger the sheen.