Yarn Play with Yarn Cards

You've seen these little rows of happy colours before, and I quite often get asked a few questions about them, mostly about the cards I use, so I thought it might be worth a little post to tell you about them.

This collection you see here is my Stylecraft Special DK collection, I thought I'd share that as it's the biggest selection I have.  I haven't quite got all the colours but I'm only missing a handful, the odd neon shade and I haven't got those mottled ones either, but I have added in the Special Baby DK (the yarn is exactly the same and it adds a few more shades) and also the Batik DK colours are in there too as they mix nicely with the Special.

I have a few cards made up for some other yarn ranges too, the Paintbox Palette, a few cotton ranges and I did start a Debbie Bliss Cashmerino set too but the colours are discontinued so frequently it soon became largely pointless.  

This set I'm showing you here are the ones I use most often though, for colour planning, design projects, palette ideas and of course, a bit of good ol' colour play for the sake of it too.  They are tools of work, procrastination but always colourful joy!

My Faded Painted Roses blanket colour palette

Palette Play

Stripe Planning

There are pretty much endless uses for these little beauties, testing out palettes is one of my favourites, and it's so great to be able to pull out the shades for the current wip and plan colour orders too.  Especially stripes, it's so easy to visualise how the rows of colour will look this way.

I used to do the same thing with the great 100g balls of yarn before I made up these cards, but these make things so much easier.  Especially when it comes to the planning stage.  My stash of Special is a reasonably alarming size and rooting around and finding different shades to try out next to each other just became a bit of a chore.  That's the thing that finally tipped me over and got me wrapping up these yarn cards in the first place but now I just couldn't be without them.

One of my favourite things about these cards, is how easy it is to know which shade is which.  There are so many glorious Special colours now that it can be quite hard to tell your Teal from Petrol and your Boysenberry from Plum at first glance.  I've popped the colour name and number on the bottom of each one so I always know which shade I have and it's super handy to have the colour codes right there for updating pattern details too.  Pretty and practical!

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So, let's get to the questions...

'Where did you get those cards?'

These are just plain old cardboard tags, like old style luggage tags I suppose, although they seem to be more often used for gift tags or wedding favours these days.  Either way, they do the job of yarn holding perfectly.  You can see a good amount of colour on each card and they are so reasonable to buy too.

You can get packs of 100 or so at a time.  I get mine from Amazon.  Here's the link to ones I usually order:

2 x 100 Brown Kraft Paper Tags

(Also, white versions of the above - thanks to DevonMaid for finding those!)

But I've also seem these cute ones too...

100 Gift Tags (with Hearts)

Ooh and they do white ones, even better...

100 White Kraft Paper Tag (with Hearts)

Oh heck, I want to re-wrap all my cards now!

'Did you buy a ball of every colour of yarn to make your cards?'

Well, not quite.  To be honest, my stash of Special was quite sizeable when I embarked on this project, but even so, I probably had only half of the available colours at the time.

Once I'd wrapped all the colours I did own, I will admit that I did go and buy some more.  Because the Special is so well priced I found it manageable to top up my stash a bit further but even then, I only went for the colours that I liked and thought that I would be likely to use in future.

That still left me short of quite a few colours, so after that, I went on a little swapping spree.  It only takes a few yards to whip one of these cards up so it's easy to spare a little from those sizeable balls.  I contacted a few friends and we were able to swap lengths of our missing colours with each other.

And so the collections came together.  When any new colours come out I add those to the ever expanding range too, so now I'm not too far off a complete set.

Do you make these cards for all the different yarns you use?

Nope!  I've only started cards for yarns that I use really often, that I know I will be likely to use them again and that have colours that stick around.  I do have all the Paintbox Palette colours, because they sent them to me, but for other ranges I generally tend to just wrap up cards for the colours I do have.

I've started a set for the Stylecraft Life DK range for example, but I only have a few as I haven't used that many of the colours yet.  I'll add to it as I do though. I'll probably make a set for my Bergere de France Ideal colours at some point too.  I have quite a few of those, they have a lovely colour range and it's one I've come back to again and again.

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So there you have it.  I do hope that helps, but if there is anything I missed out or any other question you want to ask, just pop it in comments below and I'll answer you there.

In the meantime, I'm probably going to play with my cards for a little bit longer... just till I finish my coffee.  It's always important to get that daily dose of colour!

S x

♥

#CherryHeart

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