Vintage Green

I took my mother to a local dollar store recently. While we were going up and down the aisles, she spotted a bin of brown fun fur yarn, and jokingly said “Look! You can knit me a mink coat!”. A lady further down the aisle gave us a funny look. Did she think my mom was serious? Anyway, next to the fun fur was a bunch of Patons Classic Wool, all the same color – leaf green. I’ve been on a yarn diet since I have so much in my stash, but for a buck a skein? Heck yes. It’s not the most flattering color for my skin tone, but I figured even if I didn’t use it for something, someone would. I could make some baby stuff, or even just give it all to my mom to use for her charity knitting (hats and scarves for the local homeless shelter).

They had 20 skeins, so I bought them all. Over the next couple of days I checked out some of the other stores in the same chain, but none of them had yarn.

I didn’t really expect to like the yarn all that much – I loved the old Patons Classic Wool, but had heard it wasn’t as good since they moved production from Canada to Turkey. But I played around with it and did some swatches – and I really like it. It feels much nicer than Cascade 220, and doesn’t really seem much different from the older version.

I figured that if I made a cardigan, or mixed it with white in a stranded/striped sweater, the color might not be that bad on me. But there was so much of it! That’s when I had the idea to double it and use it as super-bulky yarn. I browsed through my patterns, and came up with a Bernat pattern booklet from 1966. I’ve been wanting to make some of those old patterns. The doubled worsted yarn gave exactly the right gauge, so I started on one of the patterns.

It’s big and bright and very green, but so far I like it.