Choosing yarn can be overwhelming. A yarn shop presents a vast array of colours and textures, and there ought to be a logical way to narrow it down.
There is. Start from the project and what it has to do. Shop staff can point you at the right yarn if you tell them, but it is worth being able to work it out yourself.
Is safety an issue?
This question comes first because it eliminates options outright rather than merely ranking them.
If you are making a pot holder, avoid acrylic entirely. It melts rather than scorches, onto the pan and onto the hand. Cotton is the only sensible answer for anything that touches heat.
For babies and small children, everything must be washable and nothing should shed. For anything worn near a naked flame, natural fibres char while synthetics melt.
How will it be washed?
The second elimination. Be honest about it.
A baby blanket, a child’s sweater, a dishcloth, a pair of socks – all of these will go through a machine whatever the label says, because nobody hand-washes a toddler’s jumper twice a week. Choose superwash wool, acrylic or cotton and accept it.
Save the hand-wash-only yarns for shawls, special-occasion garments and anything that will be worn occasionally and carefully.
How hard will it be worn?
Socks, mittens and children’s clothes take real abrasion. They want something with nylon in the blend, or a firmly spun wool. A softly spun single-ply yarn will look beautiful and wear through in a season.
A shawl worn over a coat takes almost no abrasion, and you can choose purely on how it feels and drapes.
What drape do you want?
This is where fibre matters most, and it is the part people think about last.
Wool is springy and elastic. It holds a shape, makes crisp cables and ribbing, and recovers when stretched.
Cotton is heavy and has no memory. It drapes beautifully and it grows – a cotton garment will be longer at the end of a day than at the start.
Silk and bamboo are fluid and lustrous, with even less recovery than cotton.
Acrylic sits somewhere in the middle and is the most forgiving of neglect.
For a structured garment, choose wool. For something fluid, choose a plant fibre. Choosing the wrong one is why a sweater sometimes comes out looking nothing like the photograph despite matching the gauge.
Then, and only then, colour
Once safety, washing, wear and drape have narrowed the field, choose the colour you like from what is left.
Doing it the other way around – falling for a colour and then trying to make it work – is how yarn ends up in bags at the back of a cupboard.
