Friday, September 14, 2007

Not the color I ordered!

Yarn: Yarn Pirate in Brown Sugar 480yrds Superwash Merino Fingerling Weight Thinking that I would be receiving a chocolate brown to golden to ivory. What I received was a deep maroon to a horrible shade of mustard seed/ squash/ cat yack. I opened the bag and WTH? I am so disappointed. So not what I had hoped for with my first hand-dyed, esty seller. I was expecting greatness and only received a mediocre sock yarn. I checked the tag. Yep, Brown Sugar. Guess I got the nasty dye job. Wow, I am so depressed.
I went and played around with my camera to see if under different light situations I could reproduce the colors. I hopes of reducing my disappointment, this is as close to the picture in different light. But the middle picture represents the colors in natural sunlight. Still disappointed. Guess I will stick to the Cherry Tree Hill. I am going to gather my courage and try Socks that Rock, to see how their colors turn out. I just hate spending $30+ and not receiving the colors I had hoped for.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been equally disappointed with STR - the colors do NOT always match the color I see on their site. I don't think it's my monitor either! I KNOW I am always taking a chance when buying hand dyed online. In my experience, Lorna's Laces, Cherry Tree Hill, Mountain Colors, Trekking, Schaefer Anne,Posh, Seacoast Handpaints and a few more that I can't think of right now...have been exactly the right color. But it's always fun to take a chance on a new and fun yarn too!

Karen said...

I sympathize mightily! I went through a huge hassle trying to find first a true white, and then an ice blue lace weight yarn to make a wedding shawl for my sister. This was not even a case of hand dyes being variable. It was purely monitor versus reality. Her gown was white but synthetic fabrics, which are much whiter than almost anything made of wool, alpaca, etc. I might have eventually found a cotton, linen or silk, but finally just turned to an ice blue incarnation. And even that was fraught with peril. I finally bought enough of the two shades of Knitpicks Alpaca Cloud that I thought would work - ended up using one of those and selling the other one to one of my knitting buddies.

I also once custom ordered some hand dyed yarn from Schaeffer Yarns in NY. I basically asked them to reproduce an old colorway, and described it pretty well (in my estimation). What I got was beastly - mustard, dusty purple, etc. instead of the "sunset colors" I had described. Fortunately they were willing to do it over (it was a lot of yarn and very expensive).

I have a couple of suggestions for what to do:
write back to the dyer and see what they say:
overdye it (if you went over it with a warm brown you might get an "almost solid" that was a better color for you);
post it on a swap list (such as Knit Swap) - someone almost always likes what you don't, especially if it is one of the well known hand dyed yarns;
knit it up anyway - sometimes hand dyes have a wildly different appearance when knitted - or then you could over dye it afterward or give the socks to someone whose favorite colors it is.

Hope you work something out. Let me know if you want the link for Knit Swap. I am at
karen dot KVL at verizon dot net.

Laura said...

Hello,
I just saw your blog today. If you are still unhappy with the Yarn Pirate Yarn I would encourage you to contact her. I have several skeins of her yarn and they have never been that far off in matching the color presented on her web site. The skein you have looks more like Fig & Honey. I hope you have better yarn shopping experiences in the future.