Knitter's Guide to Hand-Dyed & Variegated Yarn, The: Techniques and Projects for Handpainted and Multicolored Yarn

Love this one - it's filled with hints, tips, pictures and patterns - well worth the money spent. I recommend it.

Positives:It had a couple of interesting pages on dye lengths in yarn and how it can affect pooling and shows a number of stitches that can be used to break up areas of colour.That said, the stitches shown are fairly obvious - slip stitches, moss, etc. - and the majority of the book is taken up by outdated patterns in insane yarn colours, which killed it for me.In the end I just couldn't take it seriously. This book perpetuates old (bad) craft stereotypes and missed a golden opportunity to showcase the beauty of some gorgeous hand dyed yarns by using outmoded fashions and aesthetics. A shame, really.

Wer gerne mit handgefärbten Garnen arbeitet, findet hier eine Fundgrube an Wissen, Tipps und auch einige Anleitungen. Tolles Buch empfehlenswertes Buch

What knitter doesn't love to look at, and knit with, skeins of handpainted multicolored yarn? In the skein, the yarns are "eye candy", and the changing colors entertain while the knitter knits. But these yarns have a shady "dark side": in the knitted fabric, the colors may stripe, stack up in straight or diagonal columns (flash), or create large irregularly shaped areas of single colors (pool). So what can a knitter do, to make sure that the gorgeous-in-the-skein yarn will produced an equally gorgeous fabric?This book shows you how to analyze a multicolored yarn, by examining the untwisted skein, to predict what the yarn will do in your fabric before you start to knit. Yarns dyed in spotted, short-repeat, and long-repeat color sequences will produce different effects, as will yarns dyed in "calm" and "active" colorways. But you can make these differences work spectacularly by choosing the right knitting technique: (1) going for stripes by adjusting your gauge or adding solid-color yarns; (2) adding bobbles, cables, or other textural effects to consume yarn at different rates; (3) using slipped stitches or surface floats to mix up colors; (4) using tucked-stitch patterns to stack colors; (5) alternating mismatched handpainted skeins to achieve a consistent appearance; (6) using the multicolor yarn for portions of a Fair Isle design; or (7) adding holes with lace patterns.Not only does author Lorna Miser (the founder of the highly successful Lorna's Laces yarn company) explain how to do these techniques, she illustrates their effects with simple patterns for a wide variety of knitted items (shawls, cardigans, vests, a tank top, socks, a neck cozy, a coin purse, mittens, a hat, wristlets, a placemat, a laptop case, throws). She also includes close-up swatch photos that demonstrate in detail how different stitch patterns work to manipulate the colors in multicolored yarns.This is not just another oversized book of simple knitting patterns. It is an excellent reference for any knitter who wants to understand more about knitted fabrics. And for the serious "technical" knitter or knitting book collector, it complements the excellent discussion of handpainted yarns that is found in Carol J. Sulcoski's Knitting Socks with Handpainted Yarn, by expanding the discussion to include all types of knitted items.

I would have given it 5 stars for content if I had not thought that the title was a little misleading. It should have been entitled, "USING Hand-dyed Yarn." I had expected it to be about a dying technique and a pattern that the technique fitted well. Instead, it is about yarn that has been purchased and may have been hand-dyed or not. Nevertheless, I read it from cover to cover the day I received it. The book has a lot of tips. It offered solutions to some things that I had not thought of as problems. From now on, when dyeing, I am going to measure my repeats differently for wider and narrower parts of a garment. The book has many beautiful patterns. I will definitely use patterns from this book.

I am as tempted by beautiful colors and eye candy as anyone else and have bought more than a few skeins of variegated and hand-dyed yarns, only to find that they don't always knit up to look as beautiful as a finished product as they do on the skein. I had already come to the conclusion that using variegated yarns mixed with solids would make interesting Fair Isle patterns, but I was thrilled to read that there are three books currently on the market that address using variegated yarns to their best advantage.Lorna, of Lorna's Laces, contributes The Knitter's Guide to Hand-Dyed and Variegated Yarns. The value of this book is in the material teaching the knitter how to read a skein of variegated yarn and determine what kind of colors are used and what pooling and striping patterns can be expected. Swatching, not only for gauge but to determine how the yarn patterns is stressed and is important for success with this kind of yarn. When buying for a project, make certain to buy enough to swatch not only for gauge but different stitch patterns.The next things that are discussed are different stitch patterns and techniques to "break-up" the tendency of variegated yarns to pool. The book is very valuable on this front in terms of providing a lot of different stitch patterns and discusses how these stitches will combine with the different types of color and variegation. The one place the book fell short for me was with the projects presented, which I found a bit blah, with a few exceptions, but as I bought the book for the stitches and information about variegated yarns, this is less of a problem for me, but might affect other knitters.All in all a good introduction to using variegated yarns to make the most of their beautiful colorways in finished garments and projects. The information is basic, but provides a great jumping off spot for the adventurous knitter and will help knitters of all levels who don't know quite how to make the most of those lovely variegated yarns but can't resist buying them anyway. Solid introduction to a topical knitting issue.

I love to knit and am always looking for what is new and different. I was disappointed in the content of the book - same old sweaters, mitts, socks, but done with variegated yarns, sometimes alternating yarns (same color way, different texture) or inserting a pain yarn every other row. A few pages in the front that talk about how to "read" your variegated yarn, and get the colors to line up, but this seemed to be mostly ignored with the projects.