Gradient Yarn Notes & Suggestions

I have worked with Gradient Dyed Yarn a lot & absolutely love when you find the perfect combination of yarn & project.  There are some gorgeous ones out there!  But there are a few tricks to working with this yarn when planning out your project.  I hope my notes will be useful to others when you can't resist the urge to work with this delightful yarn.

Planning Out The Project: When using Gradient type yarns to create a project where several skeins are required, it is important to come up with a plan prior to starting so that the color changes repeat in the same sequence as the first skein.  

To do this I place all of my skeins next to one another.  Sometimes two or more of the skeins already follow a color change sequence.  But most of the time, the end or beginning of the skeins are random.  When this is the case, I first choose what color I would like at the beginning of the blanket.  Then I place my skeins in the order I have selected so that when I am finished with one skein, I know which skein I want to choose next.  

Changing Skeins:

When I am coming to the end of a skein there are a few things to consider.  First, I will look at my project & decided whether a color change in the middle of my row is preferable or not.  (In the picture, you can see I am about to start a Trc Row so I have decided to change colors now with the next skein.) Depending on where I am at, I may choose to set aside the remainder of the skein & change skeins early so that the pattern doesn't have a noticeable change in the middle.  Second, I want to make sure I don't have many more rows of that color than I have in other areas of my project. (In this project, the lighter purple sections are only 3-4 rows.  I have a lot of light purple I could use here but it wouldn't follow the color changes in the rest of the blanket if I had a light purple section of 8-9 rows.  For that reason, I am ending my skein early.) When I am ready for the next skein, I figure out the color sequence of the next skein & where my current skein is ending in that sequence.  With the cake of yarn, it is fairly easy to grab the chunk I do not want & pull it out of the way as shown in the pictures.

Pattern Selection: When working with gradient type yarn, it is important to also think about where color changes are falling within the project you are making.  For this reason, I enjoy making the Ripples/Feathery Lace Blanket.  I have tried several other projects & found that color changes were too noticeable & I was cutting the yarn constantly.  In my opinion, I may as well buy solid colored yarn.  Solid colored yarns tend to be less expensive & look better when color changes are obvious within most patterns.  In my experience with the Lion Brand Mandala yarn, I have seldom had areas with the Ripples/Feathery Lace Blanket where there are drastic color changes in the middle of the Trc sections.  There have been a few times where I haven't been able to finish the Trc section & the next color is showing a very noticeable color change.  In these cases, I have gone back & cut the yarn to change the color early so that the entire row is the next color.  

This is a pretty Virus Blanket I made using Caron Cakes.  Because it is worked in the round, the outer rounds require a lot more yarn than the inner ones.  After several rounds, there wasn't enough of a color to complete a round.  And since rounds all join in the same corner, it was very noticeable.  For this blanket, I ended up cutting apart the skeins & joining where I wanted each color change to occur.  In my opinion I might as well have bought solid colored skeins.  They are often less expensive & I would have had less places where I needed to join in new yarn.  

If you are in love with Gradient Colored Yarns like I am, they definitely can add interest & beauty to the right project.  I hope the notes & suggestions I have made will help you to complete the perfect project.

To help you choose your next project with gradient dyed yarn,, here is one more example of using the same yarn & creating two different projects.