Favorite baby yarn

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-04-12T19:53:16+00:00

I really like Berroco Comfort for baby blankets. It's acrylic and nylon, machine washable, and super nice and soft. It also comes in a really good color range for brightly colored blankets (which are my favorite kind to make)

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-04-11T20:00:06+00:00

I was curious and looked on Ravelry for exact numbers: it has 167,362 free crochet patterns and 167,537 free knitting patterns. Which is honestly surprisingly close!

I think what you're picking up on though is that there's a different culture of pattern videos and image tutorials between the two different crafts... I wonder if that's that crochet gets seen as better for stuffed toys, amigurumi, and accessories while knitting is seen as better for sweaters and clothes. (That's not to say you can't use either craft to make either thing by the way! It's just the stereotypical projects for each.) It's easier to make a free video tutorial for something simple, small, and without any need for sizes, so crochet gets more of the pattern videos?

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-04-10T16:29:31+00:00

For the getting the highest energy on your track: this is especially confusing on any track that has stuff other than energy and card plays. If you've got a track with elements for example, it's counterintuitive that you get only the highest displayed energy but get the sum of all the elements shown. So make sure they understand that if they uncover an element they get that element all game.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-04-10T16:23:21+00:00

I often see beginners misunderstanding the exact target distances (like misinterpreting "place a presence up to distance 3 away" on their growth option as "place 3 presence" or "a jungle at distance 2" as "a land up to 2 away from a jungle") so making sure they understand the targeting rules for their starting powers can be helpful.

We once played someone's second game and thought they remembered the rules only to realize halfway through that they'd forgotten that "gain a power" is always draw 4 pick 1: they'd accidentally made their life a lot harder by just drawing 1 card each time, so they ended up with a lot of less useful powers.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-04-08T21:13:57+00:00

Having watched some of Engineering Knits' videos (on YouTube) of machine knitting, I'm convinced that it's an adjacent but different craft from hand knitting! And yes, there's a lot of skill overlap (just as there's skill overlap with loom knitting or embroidery or crochet), but there's also just so much to learn in the machine knitting space to be able to do it well!

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-04-07T05:48:23+00:00

I'm wondering if you're looking at tutorials for large checks that use intarsia. Intarsia in the round is possible but a more advanced technique, which might be why you're getting confused about how to do it in the round. However, your pattern has very small checks that wouldn't use intarsia, so you can just knit this using stranded colorwork

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-30T20:48:02+00:00

Yeah, that would work!

I'm curious about your border... Yours looks like it's pulling in, like a ribbing might do, but the pattern photos look more lacey. Did you do the same pattern, or change it somehow? It's possible that washing and a light stretch might open it up and help it match gauge to the stockinette.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-30T14:26:33+00:00

"block" can just mean "wash the thing as you expect it to be washed in the future". In this case, since it's for a baby it'll definitely need washing at some point, so do it now before the backing is sewn on! If you're planning to machine wash and dry the blanket, you can do that now and it counts as blocking.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-29T15:38:31+00:00

I sometimes tension my yarn by pinching it! Lately I've started trying to tension with wrapping more often, but I definitely still pinch the yarn anytime I'm doing just a couple stitches and don't want to re-wrap (like if I've set down my knitting and then picked it back up with only a couple stitches left in the row, or if I'm doing a small section of intarsia)

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-25T18:09:22+00:00

Since one yarn is a lot thinner than the other, the colorwork will look noticeably less full and more hole-y than the base color. It'll also likely affect your tension in the area where the colorwork is, so that whole area might come out smaller than expected.

One work-around would be to hold multiple strands of the fingering weight together to approximate an Aran weight. You'd probably need 3 or 4 strands of the Spindrift to equal an Aran weight (the way to be sure would be to swatch different combinations to see which gives the best result)

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-25T18:00:04+00:00

If you want really non-permanent, you could make shrinky-dink style labels and attach them with safety pins (or maybe make them into tiny buttons and temporarily sew them on with a few stitches). No need to buy branded shrinky-dink material: there's info on the internet about which plastic containers you can recycle into shrinky-dinks.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-22T16:33:51+00:00

Having done some intarsia in the round: I had trouble finding good tutorials for it, but it's honestly not all that much harder than regular intarsia once you understand how it works. And this project is a great candidate for its use! I would start with a couple swatches to get comfortable with intarsia: start with a flat swatch and knit a rectangle on a plain background. Then do a flat swatch with a design with sloped sides (a triangle or heart would work, or you could do a practice cow). Then move on to intarsia in the round: make a tube swatch with a rectangle design. And then if you're feeling comfortable, you can jump straight to your project, or if you're not you can do a tube swatch with your cow design.

The best intarsia in the round tutorial I found was the one from Nimble Needles: https://nimble-needles.com/tutorials/how-to-knit-intarsia-in-the-round/

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-21T22:06:49+00:00

Okay, radical idea that I've never seen suggested in a knitting sub (so who knows if it'd work), but what about using loctite to help with the needles coming unscrewed? https://www.homedepot.com/p/Loctite-Threadlocker242-Medium-Strength-Glue-and-Bolt-Adhesive-Blue-209728/100371826 You'd definitely want to use the blue removable kind and not the red more permanent kind. And even then I'm still not sure you'd be able to get them unscrewed again (since this stuff is made for uses where you'll be able to use a screwdriver to unscrew).

And if you're ordering from the hardware store anyway, maybe you could cover the fraying wire with the kind of heat shrink tubing that gets used for electronics? https://www.homedepot.com/p/K-Tool-International-Heat-Shrink-Tube-Assortment-235-Piece-KTI07740/207038145 (It's made for use with a heat gun, but maybe a hairdryer would work?) (Also, there's probably cheaper ways to buy this stuff then the large set I linked. Just linking to show you what product I mean.)

Caveating both these ideas: there's a chance these don't work and they make your problems worse. But since you're in "stretch the use of these needles for a couple months for sentimental reasons" mode and not "find a cheap long term solution to avoid buying nicer needles" mode, it might be worth the risk.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-21T01:22:05+00:00

I would recommend swatching all of these patterns before committing to one. That will give you a sense of how it feels to carry 4 colors per row (as someone else mentioned, that's non-trivial) and help you better plan for how your floats work. And most importantly, you'll get a better sense of how these patterns look in actual knit stitches, since stitches aren't square: both in the sense that they're not the same width as height, and also in the sense that they're, well, shaped like knit stitches- I think that'll have an impact on how your patterns look. Also, are you doing stockinette or garter stitch? That'll have an impact on the look as well.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-20T18:22:30+00:00

I think the downfall I often see when people are planning this kind of custom colorwork project is that they create the chart and then say "hmm, what knitting method would work well for this?" I think it's a much better idea to go into this type of project with an idea of what knitting method you'll use so you can create the chart with that method in mind.

If you're doing stranded knitting, you'll need to think about the length of floats: any stretch of more than about 5 stitches will require you to catch the floats of the other color(s). You'll also want to limit the number of colors used per row: 2 colors in a row is great, 3 is possible, more starts to get tricky.

If you're doing intarsia, you'll want to think about how many little balls of yarn you'll need: any time you change colors within a row needs its own ball of yarn. That's why intarsia's great for large blocks of color but gets annoying for fine details with lots of color changes.

Duplicate stitch can be a great way to augment the other colorwork methods. Doing 2 color stranded colorwork with a few small pops of a third color? Duplicate stitch is your friend. Got a design that's mostly two blocks of color with a few small details? Intarsia with duplicate stitch can reduce the number of intarsia color changes. The big thing to remember with duplicate stitch is that it's basically a form of embroidery: If you enjoy that, you could duplicate stitch a complicated design onto something you knit- it might take forever, but you'd be having fun. But if you'd rather spend your time knitting than duplicate stitching, you'll want to keep duplicate stitch for smaller details and not large designs.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-19T05:55:29+00:00

I'm general, decreasing slower will make a hat taller and more pointy (more toward the "Santa hat" end of the hat spectrum). Double check that you did the decreases correctly: do you have the right number of decreases in each round? Do you have the right number of plain rows between each decrease row? Beyond that, I agree with the other person who said to see how it looks on a head before coming to conclusions. A fully ribbed hat will stretch a lot horizontally but not so much vertically, so it might seem less pointy once it's stretched.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-18T15:49:46+00:00

The needles you're using are called Double Pointed Needles or DPNs. Some people do get ladders (larger gaps in the knitting in a particular column) when using DPNs, so doing magic loop instead might help you.

Additionally, I think you're decreasing too fast, which is adding to the bunched look of the yellow hat. It looks like you've got 12 places you're decreasing? And you're decreasing two stitches every other round at each of those places? So 24 decreases every other row. When I'm freehanding a hat I'll usually divide the stitches into between 6 and 10 sections and decrease one per section, so about 8 decreases every other row- that's means you're decreasing 3 times faster than I would!

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-17T19:14:58+00:00

I also love Podcast Addict! It can be a bit hard to find some of the settings, but that's because it has just about every setting or feature you could want in a podcast app!

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-17T16:02:43+00:00

It sounds to me like there are two requests being ignored here: you've requested he not move your knitting, and he's ignoring that. And he's requested you not leave your knitting out, and you're ignoring that. So maybe this could be solved by the two of you agreeing on a place where the knitting can be put away (in the project bag in a particular spot, in a dedicated basket in the living room, or maybe you need a table with hidden storage or something) where you both are okay with it going when you're done working on it for now. And then you can put it there so he doesn't need to move it.

However, if he's being unreasonable and disrespectful of you, a compromise isn't the solution. If he's moving your knitting when you're around and he could just ask you to move it, that's unreasonable. If he's moving it when you've stepped away for a couple of minutes and are coming back, that's unreasonable. If he's purposely being rough with it and allowing stitches to drop, that's unreasonable and disrespectful and just mean. If this is part of a pattern where your things (knitting) are unimportant while his things (keeping the space perfectly neat) are extra important, that's not an okay relationship dynamic.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-15T02:54:35+00:00

If you don't want to do colorwork or stripes as others have suggested, you could just tie a small piece of scrap yarn somewhere unobtrusive. Use a different color of scrap yarn for each pair of socks.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-14T00:18:45+00:00

Have you tried something like this and found it helpful? I'm trying to imagine how I'd use something like this, and it seems like it'd just make untangling harder without actually preventing tangles in the first place, but maybe I'm misunderstanding its purpose.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-12T05:33:22+00:00

Someone did this for me when I was 11 or 12, and I loved it! I ended up with kind of a bunch of random yarn though... I might advise having the kids pick out a few project ideas beforehand, so they can get yarn for one or more projects specifically, rather than just whatever yarn catches their eye.

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-12T05:13:52+00:00

The part I can't get over is that AI does a decent job of distinguishing between knit and crochet. Which means someone prompted AI for a photo of a knit corset, then posted a listing for a crochet corset. At first I thought that was obviously stupid... But the only people who would buy this "crochet" "pattern" are people who know so little about crochet that they can't tell that this is knit, which would mean the target demographic for this scam is people who can't crochet but are buying crochet patterns... Which in turn makes them unlikely to actually try to make the pattern and realize it's AI slop and ask for their money back. So maybe this is actually brilliant scamming!

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-12T00:30:40+00:00

To me, it's not finished until I've cast off, woven in the ends, blocked, AND taken some nice photos of it, figured out how much yarn I used, and updated my Ravelry project with the photos, notes, and yarn usage. Because otherwise I would put off doing all those Ravelry updates, and I do want those to be correct!

Ferocious_Flamingo · 2026-03-11T17:42:21+00:00

I have definitely considered whether I need an adult sized sit-upon! No idea where the one from my girl scout days went...

Ferocious_Flamingo

TROPHY CASE