top of page

A Different Sort of Color Pooling


Y'all. I know planned color pooling is too hot for its own good right now. And I know that I just shared another color pooling project with you. But this? This is EXTREME color pooling!

Karen Robinson of Round Table Yarns brewed up a wickedly delicious self striping yarn for Halloween and even though I knew I wouldn't be making socks out of her sock yarn, I've been wanting to play with one of her self striping colorways for some time now! So, enter Tarn Wathelene:

Merlin in Tarn Wathelene, Self Striping Sock Yarn by Karen Robinson of Round Table Yarns

Mmm. Just look at all that Halloweeny goodness! What I didn't realize when I ordered this yarn was just how L O N G she could make a stripe of color! It's pretty impressive! I asked her how she does it and she said she just makes extra long hanks from the yarn before dyeing using a warping mill. So simple! Although I can virtually guarantee that I would get such a long hank of yarn hopelessly tangled up in itself, so I'm still impressed.

There are four color segments in this yarn: long orange, long black, short orange, and short black. And when I say long, I mean L O N G!

Because of that, it was a little bit harder to get a feel for how this yarn would work for color pooling. Normally, simply untwisting the hank will show the color lengths, but since Karen (thankfully!) rewound her super long hanks into more reasonable sized ones, unwinding it didn't reveal the true nature of the striping just yet.

Merlin in Tarn Wathelene, Self Striping Sock Yarn by Karen Robinson of Round Table Yarns

So just out of curiosity, I decided to try to recreate the original hank and see how the striping might look. So I made this mess:

Merlin in Tarn Wathelene, Self Striping Sock Yarn by Karen Robinson of Round Table Yarns

Oy! I was *this* close to getting myself in a yarn barf pickle of my my own making. It's a good thing I only tried to do a couple rounds! I just could not believe how long the stripes were, though. Which actually made me really excited to play with it!

So I pulled out a hook and started crocheting. I loved the way this looked even just swatching with it.

Swatching with Tarn Wathelene by Karen Robinson of Round Table Yarns

But get this, using an E/3.5mm crochet hook and the linen stitch,