Making things harder than they need to be

We're going to visit friends in Philadelphia next week, and I owe this friend a handknit baby gift. I knew I wouldn't be able to knit a February Baby Sweater as planned, so I looked through my books and decided to make the Victorian Baby Bonnet [Ravelry link]. Cute, right? All I needed was two colors of a worsted weight cotton. I have worsted weight cotton in my stash. I have a lot of stash yarn. Did I like any of that stash yarn for this project? No, I did not.

Still, no problem. I work in a yarn store. I'll just run in and grab two colors of Tahki Cotton Classic, like the pattern calls for. This will be really quick, I told myself.

Was it really quick? No, no it was not. We take our yarn color choices very, very seriously at Natural Stitches. When we write in the store blog about the wall of Cascade 220 functioning as a painter's palette, we are not kidding. Melissa gave up casting on for Lent, so she's been planning fair isle sweaters to take the edge off. One of our regular activities has been pulling half of the Cascade wall down and seeing how the different colors look next to each other. Recently, we expanded the Cotton Classic color choices, and so instead of running in during The Toddler's nap and grabbing two colors, Melissa and I ended up pulling down at least ten different colors and listing the pros and cons of each combination.

This is what we ended up with. I am so into the tonal color combinations these days.