Vacation Butterfly: Yarn Choices

The simplest approach to choosing yarn for this shawl is to select Urth Monokrom or Urth Uneek. The reason I enjoy working with these fibers is that the the color choices are made for you through the yarn. If you choose instead to work with separate colors, you will need to decide where to place those colors. If you prefer this path, we have supplied a color planning sheet for your yarn mapping and you can follow my example in the Mad_Tosh shawl. It is your choice - either you ride the wave of letting the Urth yarns happen as they will or you choose to make the choices yourself.

If you are selecting hank dyed yarns rather than blank dyed yarns*, I have a few pointers for you. In my opinion tonal or speckled yarns are best for three of your colors, and a highly variegated color section yarn only works well in one place, because otherwise the section yarn starts to fight against the design of the short rows and can visually distract from the pattern. Personally, I would not suggest one of these gorgeous yarns to be used as anything other than MC1. Although I have not knit this in blank dyed yarns other than Urth, I’m certain there are other options out there.

Regarding the use of alternate yarns: Should you opt to work with yarns other than those recommended in this pattern, I advise asking your friendly local yarn store or online retailer to help you with those decisions. Since I do not sell yarn, I do not feel qualified in helping you with those choices, so please seek this assistance through a qualified retail source.

* Hank dyed is a shorter color transition than hand dyed yarn. Blank dyed means the dyer uses a knitted blank and can do longer color transitions.