With so many lovely hand-dyed yarns out there most of us have gotten used to dealing with the variegated yarns pooling, striping and other anomalies. As a result we all have different ways of coping with the shift from skein to skein in a hand-dyed multi and take precautions when knitting something that takes multiple skeins.
When we worked in LYS’s for years we did a ton of customer education to ensure that folks would buy enough yarn, since that one rare color and lot of color of Koigu, for example, would never ever look the same again. In order to eliminate any pooling or skein to skein issues, we taught customers to alternate skeins by knitting two rows with one ball and of another, maybe for the whole skein or for a few inches before attaching a new ball.
The Fibre Co. yarns, however, are not variegated. These two skeins of Organik in Desert Canyon, for example, look pretty darn similar.
So why am I talking about variegated yarn on this blog? (Nope, sorry, we are not introducing hand-painted multis). Although The Fibre Co. yarns do not typically have more than one color in a skein, each skein is individually hand-dyed in order to create the gorgeous color saturation and tonal depth and layering The Fibre Co is known for.
As a result, we highly recommend you don’t treat our yarns the same way as you would commercially/mechanically dyed yarns. Each skein is unique, and even dyelots within the same bag will have slight variation between skeins. For example, these two skeins of The Fibre Co. Terra in Logwood Purple have visible variation between (and within) the skeins.
The dye lot number does tell us important information: the day the yarn was dyed and what other skeins it was dyed with in the same pot (Hence, the “lot”). If you are making a sweater, or anything that requires more than one ball, try to buy within dye lots but also be sure to alternate skeins if you are concerned about slight variation between skeins. It may seem like a pain, but it is less of a pain than having to rip out half of the front of a cardigan.
Ripped three times! [Insert crying emoticon here.]
Hopefully this little bit of info will help you to enjoy The Fibre Co. yarns just that much more! If you have any questions about this, or want more info about a specific yarn or color and how it behaves, don’t hesitate to shoot us a line and we would be glad to help!