How To Do Planned Pooling and A Giveaway To Try It Yourself!

This post is re-blogged from a post made earlier this year as an entry for the Deramores Blog Awards 2014.  Scroll down to enter a BIG YARN GIVEAWAY where you can try Planned Pooling yourself!

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As you may know from reading my blog, I fell in love the new fingering weight sock yarn Rowan Fine Art (click here to buy this yarn at Deramores.com)

My Fine Art Tee is blogged here.

My Fine Art Hood is blogged here.

But did you know that Fine Art has a big brother: Fine Art Aran?

To be honest, I found the color palettes to be rather outrageous compared to the Fine Art!  First, I really don't go for highly variegated yarns.  Second, the colors in the particular skein I had seemed to be such a mish mash, I didn't know how on earth they could ever knit up well.

That being said, they do look good together in this parrot!

But I didn't want to look like a parrot.

There are currently eight shades in this 50% wool, 25% alpaca, 20% mohair, 5% silk blend.  Note: fingering weight Fine Art has no alpaca, but 25% polyamide instead (ideal for socks).

Can you guess my colorway?

One of the reasons I'm not into variegated yarns is how the colors can pool in odd ways.  This can be seen in a couple of the garments from the Fine Art Aran Mini-Collection (available from Deramores.com here):

Van Gogh (original pattern is Moonlight by Kim Hargreaves)

But it looks quite mesmerizing in the free pattern, Jupiter, available from the Rowan website:

These types of  yarn can go so crazy in some places, but less in others because the skeins are "space-dyed" with high-contrast colors. 

You can tell a space-dye when you have really stark changes of colors, usually hand-dyed on the skein, as in Fine Art Aran.

This is done to great effect in self-striping sock yarns where one yarn creates intentional striping colorwork.

How on earth do they manage to do that, you ask?  Planned Pooling!!  Basically, if you know the width of the item you are going to knit (and a sock is generally a predictable width), you can dye yarn so that it pools together to make a pattern.

WOWZERS, WATERMELONS!!

From knitpurlgirl

But how about working it backwards?  Can you take a space-dyed yarn and figure out the pattern it will make?  YES, and I'm going to show you how.

Karla Steubing (a.k.a. Statnerd on Ravelry) is the queen of Planned Pooling on the internet:

Luckily for us, there are calculators on the web for this...

HOW TO DO IT

1. Open up your skein (or pull many lengths of your ball and loop it into a skein) to see the color order, starting anywhere.

I saw 12 colors, in a 6-color repeat:

Green - Orange - Green - Blue - Purple - Blue 

NOTE: Make sure to measure each wave of color, even if they repeat themselves, the hand-dyer may have made some of them different lengths!

2. Make a swatch (about 30 sts wide), and record how many stitches each color band takes.  It will be a bit different each time the color comes up, so take an average.  

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This is where my note above came in handy... one "orange" was 7 stitches, but the other was 9!

3. Start knitting again for a few rows (maybe 50 sts this time) and double- check your stitch counts.  If you are falling short most of the time, decrease the number of sts in that color band.  It's much easier to loosen stitches than to tighten them, believe me.

4. Go to a planned pooling calculator site by searching for "planned pooling".  "Add a color" until you have enough, then go through the color wheel to pick the perfect hues.  End by filling in the number of stitches for each color.

5. Start a "virtual" knit.  Change the stitch count by one to see the magical changes!

6. IMPORTANT: I don't think a knitter wrote this program, honestly.  A knitter's chart starts at the bottom right and goes left.  Well... this chart reads like a book.  The fix this, turn it 180 degrees, clockwise.

7. Cast-on your determined stitch count and knit!  You can use the print-out as a chart (much like a colorwork chart), or you can just memorize the number of stitches you need for each color.

NOTE: It is important that you keep to the number.  If you come out with less stitches, pull the stitches very tight until you come close.  If you come out with more stitches, loosen them up to get to the right number.

8. If you eventually find yourself off by a stitch, that's ok.  I left out a stitch 1/3 through and didn't notice until much later, but the eye can't see the difference.  Don't do this too often though, you will notice eventually!

Now, one of the problems with a fun planned pooling project like this is that you're making squares/rectangles... and there are a limited number of projects that use this shape, right?

I thought about sewing it into a cowl, much like Life Lackadaisical's in-the-round "swatch cowls", which came out quite nice.  But would I lose the planned pooling showcase?

I thought about a messenger bag.  Cool, but a lot more work and having to find contrast yarn...

Cocoknits Felted Messenger Bag

I thought about a pillow with a fabric backing, but it might shock you to know that my living room does not look like this.  ;)  Yes, sadly I live in Montreal, not Hawaii.

And then I thought... if it's called "Fine Art", let's make it literally into fine art!

I bought a $3 canvas at the "Dollar" store:

I gathered my tools.

I started nailing, making sure to weave the nail through the yarn strands so it caught.

It took A LOT of nails.  I gave up at some point, because really, it was okay, I wasn't going to sell it.

OR WAS I?!  :)

AND NOW FOR THE GIVEAWAY!

I have 5 skeins of Fine Art Aran to give away in another crazy great Planned Pooling colorway, Bolero.  There will be 2 grand prizes of 2 skeins, and 1 second prize of 1 skein.

All you have to do is be a follower of my blog and comment on how you choose to follow it!

(To follow my blog by e-mail or Bloglovin', just scroll to the top of the page and click under my header or in my sidebar.  The e-mail link will also show the RSS feed.)

The contest is open until Wednesday, April 23.  When you comment, give me your Ravelry name or some way to reach you.

Click here to leave a comment about how you follow my blog and enter the giveaway!

This blog entry is my submission to the Deramores Blog Awards 2014.  Deramores is the UK's number one online retailer of knitting and crochet supplies.