Buying yarn is more consequential than it looks. The fibre decides how a finished piece feels, how it wears, and whether it survives being washed – more than the pattern or the stitch does.
Buy for the project, not the colour
This is the mistake everyone makes, repeatedly. A colour catches your eye, you buy it, and months later it is still in a bag because it is wrong for anything you actually want to make.
Decide what you are making first. Then the yarn weight, the fibre and the quantity are all determined, and the only open question is colour.
Read the ball band
Everything you need is on it: the weight, the fibre content, the recommended needle or hook size, the gauge, the yardage, and the care instructions.
Yardage matters more than weight. Two 100g balls can hold very different lengths of yarn depending on the fibre. Patterns should specify yardage for exactly this reason, and if you are substituting, match yards rather than grams.
Care instructions decide the project. A blanket for a baby that cannot go in a machine is a blanket that will not be used.
Dye lots
Yarn is dyed in batches, and batches differ. Two balls of the same colour from different lots can be noticeably different shades – not enough to spot in the shop, very much enough to see as a band across a finished blanket.
Buy all the yarn for a project at once, and check the dye lot numbers match. Buy one ball more than you think you need; returning a spare is easy, matching a lot six weeks later usually is not.
Where to buy
A local yarn shop lets you feel the yarn, which is the one thing that cannot be done online, and the staff generally know their stock. Prices are higher and the range is narrower.
Online gives you range and price. The risk is that colours photograph inaccurately and you cannot judge softness. For a yarn you already know, this is the cheaper option; for something unfamiliar, buy one ball first.
Craft chains are good for acrylic and for large quantities of a basic worsted, which is exactly what most blankets need.
When to spend
Spend on anything worn next to the skin, and on garments that take many hours. Forty hours of work in unpleasant yarn produces something nobody wears.
Do not spend on dishcloths, first projects, or anything you are making to learn a technique. Cheap cotton and basic acrylic are entirely adequate, and it is much easier to unpick a mistake in yarn that cost very little.
Tools
A set of hooks or needles in a range of sizes, a tape measure, blunt tapestry needles for sewing up, stitch markers and sharp scissors. That is genuinely the whole list.
Buy a good tapestry needle. Sewing up is where a project is won or lost, and a blunt needle with a large eye makes it far less unpleasant.
