Something colourful

Something colourful arrived at the Treehouse last week. Due to my considerable enthusiasm and anticipation in the wake of its arrival my boyfriend expected that an unruly amount of yarn was coming the Treehouse’s way. But no, this time a very different, and curiously flat package arrived my way. It was packed with a wealth of  cardboard rectangles with colourful pieces of string tied to them: Shade cards!

I only relatively recently discovered how practical these cards are, especially for planning colourwork projects. Ravelry is great for getting an idea of how the colours will look, and I can easily spend days on end musing about different colours from behind a screen, but the cards are perfect for more thorough colour planning. These are shade cards for the different Istex Icelandic yarn ranges. I bought the Lett Lopi card a couple a months ago, At the time I didn’t think I would get much use of the other cards, but as of late I’ve been itching to trying their other yarns.  Plotulopi and Alafoss particularly had been on my radar, so this week I completed the set. 

Do you use shade cards often? Who knows, if these are a success I might go and source cards for other brands I use often. Now however, I’m off to do some serious colour plotting for a lopapeysa wardrobe…