Plymouth Yarns has always carried great basic yarns. I like their Indiecita Sport alpaca, and they now have alpaca boucle and baby alpaca yarns, too. Plymouth’s Galway Worsted 100% wool comes in a thorough color range, including some heathered yarns and nep yarns (tiny color blobs in the yarn).
Now I have another reason to like Plymouth Yarns: 100% mercerized cotton Fantasy Naturale. The sixty-nine colors of the four-ply, medium weight cotton include some variegated and some very interesting yarns with separately-variegated plies.
Whoever mixed the colors of the multi-ply variegated is really good (color number 9995). It gives the sense of terra cotta, but has contrasting bits of teal and golden yellow. A touch of black adds a delicious dark accent, and taupe provides a calming background to unite the colors. The yarn looks great in the skein, but I think it looks even better crocheted.
This yarn passes the hair test, so I need to make a sweater out of this yarn. The hair test is simply: Does it look good with my hair? I do go around checking yarns and fabrics by holding my hair up to them.
The hand test works well in fabric stores: just walk down the aisle of fabric, brushing the fabrics with your outstretched hand. It’s amazing how the color of your hand changes against the different fabrics. Anyone else have “tests” for yarn and fabric?