Ain't No Substitute: Online Resources for Your Next Project

It's time to order materials for a new crochet project! You've decided on your fibre content and weight, (If you haven't already, read my blog post here for help!) but now it's time for the fun part: colourways!

What brand of yarn should you go with? What colours? The options are endless these days!

If you're working from a pattern, does it recommend a very specific brand and colourway? What if you can't find it in stock anywhere, or access it at all in your country?

No worries! I've got a few key online resources which will help you make these decisions, plus some crucial advice on what to look for when making yarn substitutions. So let's dive in...

Brand & Colourway Choice

I'm going to say it... Ultimately there is no substitute for going to a physical shop that sells yarn (preferably a small local business which sells yarns made in your country- or even region) and touching the yarns.

But there are quite a few issues with that sentiment. Namely, many people can't just go to their local fibre boutique to touch yarn. This could be because of time and budget constraints, mobility and sensory needs or geographic location- i.e. there may not be many options for physical shops selling yarn near you, and their stock may be limited by size and access themselves.

So let me instead say: there is no substitute for purchasing different yarns (in person or online) in smaller amounts, experimenting with them, making some gauge swatches, seeing and comparing colours and textures in-person- and then getting everything you need for your upcoming crochet project. 

But if you need to make costs count, or you're just keen to get going on the next project ASAP, here's a good place to start when it comes to choosing yarn colours and brands:

Crochet Studio App

The Crochet Studio App is a free app (available for both Android and Apple) and a great starting point for creating colour palettes based on images. You may have already seen other crafters' palettes made with this app across social media because they're aesthetically pleasing and quick to produce. You can also play around with yarn brands and colours manually without use of an image, or even use a randomizing feature to plan layouts for granny square and striped blankets if that's your thing.

The best thing about this app is the colour palettes are built with colourways from several major yarn brands. The downside to this app, as with other similar resources which are specifically built for fibre artists, is that... the colour palettes are built with colourways from several major yarn brands! By this I mean that the options are limited to the brands and specific yarns that the devs have uploaded to the app so far. However, I have to say as a UK-based crafter, it is really nice to have a non-US-centric resource which includes a lot more of the popular UK/EU yarn brands.

All of that being said, you can see above that I was able to create an awesome idea for a colour palette based on an image I uploaded, taken on a recent climbing trip in the Alps. You can explore yarns by brand, weight and fibre content and I quickly saw that Stylecraft Highland Heathers (a yarn I already love and am comfortable working with) fit well with the requirements of my project. Best of all, it took me less than a minute to come up with a palette of yarns I would absolutely use for a project inspired by this snapshot.

Temperature-blanket.com

Temperature-blanket.com is another yarn-based colour palette builder but this one is a web-based app. The available yarn options seem to be a bit more US-centric, however those options are essentially crowd-sourced through suggestion- so that makes sense! And the site has a contact form specifically for requesting yarns to be added to the site. 

And don't let the name of the site full you. Obviously, Temperature-blanket.com was assumedly originally created to help people plan their temperature blanket-style projects (and it still does). However, it has infinite applications beyond this purpose. You can build yarn palettes from images, choose colourways manually, browse other crafters' palettes and import your own palettes using URLs or colour codes. (More on that below...)

Above you can see a palette I very quickly pulled from my image using the site. I like this one because you can easily add more spaces to your palette, making it good for catching highlights and smaller complimentary colours. 

What's particularly neat about Temperature-blanket.com is it's recently gone open source. This means the dev has made the code freely available on GitHub, so take a look if app development is your thing, and consider supporting the dev via their Ko-fi, which can also be found on the site, because they have not monetized the site whatsoever. 

Alternative Ways to Colour Pick

Like I said above, the limitation to using fibre art-specific resources is that you are necessarily limited to the library of yarns currently uploaded to those resources.

However, these tools can easily be used in conjunction with others to maximize your exploration of yarn options.

 Coolors

It was easy to import the palette to Temperature-blanket.com by simply pasting the copied URL. After a few minutes of exploring the yarn colourway options listed by the site, I quickly realized that Stylecraft Special DK could match almost every colour in my palette! This was great news because Stylecraft Special DK is a yarn I am well familiar with, and it suits my budget and sensory preferences.

In my opinion, this palette is by far the best match to my photo. I can easily cut it down to fewer colour options if needed, and I know I will be able to access this yarn where I live.

Substitutions 

Let's say you are working from a pattern which recommends a specific yarn and colourway, but you can't find it for purchase anywhere, either because it's out of stock, discontinued or not available in your country...

Or let's say you are still working on your own project but get your heart set on a yarn early only to find out that you can't purchase it for those same reasons... 

You're going to have to substitute!

Have no fear, substituting yarn can be very easy if you need it to be. Let's take the following example, and I'll show you how I go about it. 

The yarn above is one I came across in the process of writing this blog post and I just fell in love with the colour! The colourway name, kachelblau (kitchen tile blue), may have swayed me, too. But being a German brand, I'm finding it hard to purchase here in the UK. 

Yarnsub.com

The first place I recommend you go when looking to substitute yarns is Yarnsub.com. It's an excellent site that let's you search for a yarn (such as the Schachenmayr Catania) and filter recommended substitute yarns by fibre content and price. 

The recommendations the site gives you will then be sorted by a % match according to composition, gauge and content. You can look for substitutes which are a close match, but made by brands you can easily access. Or you can substitute fibre content by searching for substitutes which have a similar gauge, but are made from different fibre sources.

From Yarnsub, I learnt that Scheepjes Catona is a near identical match to Schachenmayr Catania and that it suited my budget. However, the one thing you can't do with Yarnsub is compare colourways. For that, we return to Temperature-blanket.com...

On the site, I searched for the original Schachenmayr Catania colourway- Kachelblau- and was able to view tonnes of comparably toned yarns with % match based on colour alone. Using this, I found the best few likely colourway matches from Scheepjes Catona, but none of them were a perfect match. So my next step was to compare the yarns using Ravelry.

Ravelry.com/yarns

Ravelry, while of course a source of crochet patterns, is also an extremely comprehensive database of yarn brands and colourways. Users of Ravelry can upload photos of their finished projects and tag the specific yarn brands and colourways they used in their pieces.

This is great news for you when looking for substitutions! Colour comparison on a PC or phone screen is always tricky, so it's best to get a look at a yarn from all angles, so to speak. Ravelry's user projects allows you to do just that, seeing your prospective yarns worked up in a variety of crocheted and knitted projects. 

When I searched for both the original Schachenmayr Catania and the multiple colourways of Scheepjes Catona, I was able to compare shades across many images. And I'm glad I did! From this I learnt that some Scheepjes blues were definitely far too bright for my liking, but I also took a bigger liking to a much lighter and cooler blue than I expected.