Yarn Review: Chroma by KnitPicks

The finished scarf

See all the beautiful colorways of this yarn here: KnitPicks Chroma

I am in LOVE with this yarn.  I’m currently working with Chroma in worsted weight but it also comes in fingering.  I recently purchased an obscene amount of multi-colored yarn because I just freaking love multi-colored yarn.  I’ve been playing around with entrelac lately and multi-colored yarn creates some really neat effects.  One of the yarns I included in my recent purchase was Knit Picks Chroma Worsted in the colorways Lollipop (pretty pastel colors) and Prism (rainbow colors).  I picked this yarn mostly because the colors were pretty and I was already ordering a few other things I needed from the Knit Picks website so I figured I might as well give it a shot.  I am SO glad I did.  I started knitting with it last night; I’m making a scarf using K1P1 ribbing and switching colorways every 2 rows.  The gradual color changes create a really neat effect when you stripe it.  The colors I chose are gorgeous and were accurately portrayed by the photos on the website.  This yarn is also REALLY REALLY soft.  Its 70% wool and 30% nylon and knitting with it is so wonderful its like candy for your fingers.  If they have a cyber monday sale I very well may be buying more; I think this stuff would be great for entrelac cowls, especially since its worsted weight and will work up faster than the fingering weight Mini Mochi I used for my first entrelac cowl.  One potential negative thing to be aware of is it does have a bit of a thick and thin quality to it.  Its single ply and most of the time its approximately the same weight but there have been a few places where it has been a little thinner than I would prefer.  I can also see one place on one of the skeins where 2 ends are knotted together creating a not so subtle color change.  But overall, I really like this yarn and will definitely be buying it again in the future!

Lollipop

Update 12/8/12:  I've worked with this yarn quite a bit since my initial review and I wanted to provide an update.  I recently finished a project with the fingering weight and it is just as lovely as the worsted.  The thick and thin problem I encountered in my first project has not reoccured, however knots ruining the subtlety of the color changes are fairly common.

Greensboro Knit and Crochet Show

Fair Isle Class Project

Knit and Crochet Show Purchases

This Saturday I went to the Greensboro Knit and Crochet Show and it was super fun!  To start with, I was very grateful that I made it there alive.  I got stuck in a torrential rainstorm during my 1-hour drive up there and had I left about a minute earlier I probably would have been part of the like TWELVE car accident I drove past.  I arrived around noon and my class didn't start til 2:00 so I had plenty of time to browse around the shopping floor.  I bought some really fun looking yarn- all self striping.  One skein of sock yarn, 2 DK, and 3 worsted weight NORO!  Yay for my first ever Noro purchase!  Its called Kureyon and 100% wool so I think I'm going to use it for a felted bag, possibly involving mitred squares.   After shopping and obtaining caffeination from the hotel coffee shop I made my way to my fair isle class.  This was the first ever knitting class I've taken.  I've learned EVERYTHING I know about knitting from books and the internet so it was nice getting help from an in person instructor and having people sitting next to me who I could compare progress with.  I've been afraid of fair isle for the entire 5 years I've been knitting but it turned out not to be that hard!  I made an awesome little wristlet and I'm totally inspired to start making all kinds of nerdy fair isle projects.  

Also I put a few new items on the Etsy Shop last week!  My FAVORITE new item is the Chaos Afghan.  I've been working on it since June and I'm very excited to have it done.  This particular afghan is going to Greg but I would love love LOVE to make more of them for custom orders!  

I think I would make a really excellent housewife.

Does anyone else just desperately want to be a housewife?  I have a finance degree and I'm in law school...and my boyfriend is an artist...so thats not too likely to happen but I think it would be really ideal.  I mean there are so many advantages...right now our apartment is a mess.  If I was a housewife instead of a stressed out law student (or stressed out lawyer a few years down the road) I would have time and motivation to clean it.  And if I was a housewife I would have time to learn how to cook and we could eat healthy home cooked meals instead of bojangles and mcdonalds.  But most importantly...I could make a real business of Niki's Knerdy Knitting. I would have time to finish more than one project a week.  I would be able to take photos in daylight.  I could learn how to spin my own yarn!  People keep laughing at me cause I tend to say things like "I wanna drop out of law school and be a full time knitter"  but like...I'm kind of serious when I say that.  

Must. Not. Buy. Yarn...yet...

Universal Yarn Classic Shades - Rainforest

Crystal Palace Yarns Mini Mochi

I've been staring longingly at the WEBS website all day trying to resist making a big yarn order of all these beautiful yarns I've been dying to try.  BUT there are so many yarn-buying events in my future that I really should hold off and buy my yarn in person because that is SO much more fun. This weekend is the Knit and Crochet show in Greensboro.  I'm signed up for a fair isle class and I'm planning on driving up 2 hours early so I can check out the sales floor.    Then Oct 8-9 is the raleigh/durham/chapel hill/cary/apex yarn crawl so I'll be driving all over the place and probably buying a little something at each shop.  I'm super super excited.  I tried to make a little yarn excursion this past weekend but it didn't work out all that great...I was driving to Atlanta to visit my sister and I intended to try to stop at a bunch of yarn stores over the course of my 7 hour drive. Unfortunately, I didn't get started until 2pm so I only got to visit 2 yarn stores cause they mostly close at 5.  The first one was The Twisted Knitter in Mebane, NC.  This store was AWESOME.  I bought 3 skeins of universal yarn classic shades which I'm pretty sure is my favorite yarn ever.  The colorways tend to remind one of Noro but the yarn is SOOO soft and as an acrylic/wool blend it is machine washable.  I'm not sure why acrylic gets so much hate...no one is allergic to it, you can machine wash it, and it can be quite soft.  Maybe the people complaining about it have been getting all their yarn at Michael's/AC Moore.  Red Heart Super Saver is NOT a good example of acrylic yarn people.  

OK I did work. Knitting Time!

Chaos Afghan

For once I’ve actually completed a law school assignment with a reasonable amount of confidence that its not complete and total shit.  At first I was like “this is too easy, I must be missing everything important”  (this how i’ve felt the entire time I’ve been in law school and usually its true) but after re-reading the assignment and the chapter of the textbook and the hornbook and a form book I’ve decided that this assignment was actually just meant to be really easy.  Yay!   Now I can go home and play with yarn!  The chaos blanket is sooooo close to being finished…I think I’m down to 3 skeins of yarn that have enough left for more rows…2 of them are practically laceweight though so they’re gonna take a little while, not sure if I can finish it tonight.  Once I get this done my next work-in-progess to finish off will be a REALLY SOFT baby alpaca mitten thats been sitting around with no thumb for like a month and then a granny square baby blanket made of different shades of pink.  

I just want to FINISH something

I'm in that awful knitting place where I have like 8 REALLY BIG works in progress and I just want to do something different.  I promised myself I'm not gonna start anything new until I finish these and from now on I'm only gonna have two works in progress at once: one nerdy thing for the etsy shop, and one thing that lets me use fun yarn (because cheap michael's yarn is great for amigurumi but sometimes a girl just needs to play with cashmere).  One of my giant works in progress at the moment is what I'm calling a Chaos Afghan.  I purchased a single-skein grab bag from Webs and picked 22 bright, fun yarns from the mix.  I'm crocheting 2 rows of each yarn in a ripple pattern and as I run out of a yarn I drop it out of the pattern and just keep on going with the yarn I have left.  When I run out of yarn it will be done.  This has been a really really fun project, I love playing with a bunch of different yarns.  And its getting pretty close to being done...not counting the gazillion ends I'm going to have to weave in once I'm finished crocheting.  I'm definitely keeping this one but I'll post a picture of it on Etsy as an example of a custom project, I'd love an excuse to buy another grab bag and make another one of these, perhaps in a different color scheme.  Once its all finished I'll get a pic up here too.

Okay weather, thats enough, now leave me alone.

The weather is out to get me today.  See I have a major phobia of tornadoes.  I’ve never experienced one but i dunno, maybe I was too young when I watched the wizard of oz because tornadoes are just the scariest thing in world to me.  This means that when the weather is in any way severe (even very heavy rain)  I get very nervous and when there are high winds I am reduced to cowering in the bathroom (because it has no windows) just waiting for the roof to blow off and me and my kitties to fly into the air and get carried away never to be seen again.  AND today the weather is absolutely screwing with me.  First, I woke up 30 minutes before my alarm went off (so annoying) because there was very heavy rain blowing against the window by my bed and it was making me too nervous to sleep.  Then the lightning and thunder started.  I was contemplating not going to class but my wonderful boyfriend offered to drive me to school on his way to work so that I wouldn’t have to walk to the bus stop in the weather from hell.  This was very sweet of him but since he starts work at 9:00 and I start class at 9:50 that meant I got to the law school an hour early and had nothing to do.  That would have been fine…except immediately upon my arrival at the law school I get an email that my first class is canceled.  Now I didn’t have anything to do until 11:00.  If I hadn’t been too scared of the weather to take the bus, I would’ve gotten the email in time and could’ve stayed home and knit for another 2 hours.  I waited out my 2 hours and went to my 11:00am class.  Halfway through I heard this siren somewhere on campus.  I was a little concerned cause hey, I have anxiety issues, but nothing came of it so I figured it was an ambulance or something.  Nope.  10 minutes later the dean (or someone else important) bursts into the classroom and informs us we need to stop class, get away from the windows, and go cower in the basement because there is a tornado.  Now the law school seems pretty sturdy, and is halfway underground so I wasn’t too worried about my own safety but my boyfriend was at work above ground and my poor little kitties were all alone at the apartment!  Thankfully after 30 minutes of shaking uncontrollably the warning was cancelled because apparently the tornado had dissipated a few miles away.  Then, in my 3rd class, the sirens came on AGAIN and we were all ushered to the basement AGAIN because there was ANOTHER tornado.  Once again, the tornado did not actually hit my part of the county and we were allowed out of the basement after 30 minutes.  All in all, I’ve experienced a lot of really unnecessary anxiety today. And I have one more class...god knows what will happen next.