Finding Yarn Information on Ravelry

When you land on Ravelry’s home page, at the top you find a ‘yarns’ tab. This essential tab is often overlooked. Clicking here opens up a world of information!

The feature we find ourselves using the most is the search bar for specific yarns. This gives us a treasure trove of valuable information!

Imagine that you went stash diving and found two skeins of Quince & Co Chickadee.  The only information you have is a tag with the name of the yarn. Enter the yarn brand and name in the search box.  You’ll find that you have three choices.  The yarn you have is Chickadee Organic Heathers, so click on that.  This brings up a page with all the details about the yarn:  weight, typical gauge, yardage per skein, types of fiber in it, and more. At the top of this page is a tab for pattern ideas; many of the patterns in this category have been designed with Chickadee.  Another tab is for projects; here are the Ravelry projects using Chickadee. Now you can see what others have created with this yarn and make an informed decision about what you want to make!

Another situation that is close to the one above but not quite the same:

You found a pattern for a linen summer tee that is just the thing you want to wear with your new white capris!  However, the yarn suggested by the designer is no longer made. You were just at My Sister Knits and noticed that the colors of Quince & Co Sparrow are exquisite and you’d love to use it! The pattern calls for DK weight yarn.  You search for Sparrow and find that it’s fingering weight.  What to do? You realize that you really, really want to use Sparrow so you click on pattern ideas to see what’s there. Finding 32 pages of patterns, you need to narrow your search!  Click on the All categories drop down menu, choose clothing, and then tops.  You want one with sleeves, so choose ‘tee’. Now you’ve narrowed your search to a reasonable 6 pages!

A third way to use this feature:

You’re looking for a DK weight alpaca blend.  Choose ‘advanced search’ under ‘search yarns’.  The next page gives you a number of filters on the left side.  Since you want a blend, in the Number of fiber types box choose 2.  In the Weight box choose DK.  In the Fiber type box choose Camelid and then Alpaca.  This brings up 15 pages of yarns!  To narrow your choices, go back to the Fiber type box, choose Wool, and then Merino, and in the drop down menu at the bottom of the box, choose ‘AND: match all of these’.  This narrows your search to only 5 pages!  Playing with other filters will narrow your yarn choices even more.

We encourage you to explore the yarns tab!