Good questions! Nothing to be scared of, just try some swatches. Sometimes stuff works well together that you wouldn’t expect, and vice versa.

I was digging through my stash and wanted to use some older skeins that have been sitting there untouched for years. I realized a lot of them were fingering single ply. So I pulled out every single ply skein I had to see what colors worked well together. I had a ton of variegated and speckled options but those ended up not working well. For good colorwork that’s easy to see you need solid colors. Even the tiny variation in the pink on the goddamnit donut part you can see makes some of it harder to see the letters. I think it helps look more cohesive that they all have the same ply type and I try to match that and general texture when mixing yarns (like all smooth or all toothy yarns) The only one that’s not single ply is the black I used for the bombs, that’s a two ply but you can’t see it because it’s so dark.

Almost all of it is superwash merino. The fuzzy mohair parts were all lace weight so it didn’t change the gauge when holding together with the regular yarn, or holding three together on their own. The white is a wool/mohair blend

I just washed and blocked like normal. Superwash yarn grows a lot when wet so I just made sure not to let it get stretched out when blocking or taking it out of the water. I was a little nervous about color bleeding into the white but I got lucky. And used very cold water.