Diving into planned color pooling

Oct 23, 2017
3 min read

The other day when I was in WalMart, I spotted this yarn and just HAD TO HAVE IT!!!! It's just so bright and tropical looking when everything around me is turning brown and dying off for winter.

I decided this would look really cool as a scarf or baby blanket done up as argyle with planned color pooling. Now, I understand the concept and know it's not that hard to do, but.....I want to do something in a granny stitch, not single crochet. I'm guessing it'll work up the same, but I can't really find anything online about pooling with a granny stitch. Time to figure it out for myself!

If you've never seen planned color pooling, it's when you make sure your color changes line up to make patterns instead of randomly "pooling". Here's some examples....

When I pulled out the first color, I was really surprised at just how long this is! I've never seen such a long color change! I haven't used any of the Red Heart Stripes before. I think I'm going to like it though. My thought is to chain the first color, then go along and granny stitch until I get back to the first color, then count each cluster as a "stitch" to plan out the pooling. Sounds good in theory, right?

Man these colors are long. I'm so happy I 1) decided to use a 6mm - J Hook rather than the usual 4mm - G Hook I grab for everything and 2) decided to do granny stitches rather than single crochets. I ended up with a chain of 367!!!! That's just the yellow....with a J Hook. Wow.

I ended up with 16 clusters of light orange, then almost 16 orange. I could only get 2 double crochets before it changed to red, so I ripped back a bit and tightened up my stitches a little and still only got 2, so I decided it'll be fine to leave that cluster at 2.

No big deal.

Ok, so 16 red, 16 pink....I see a pattern here. I'm gonna go ahead and guess at 16 of everything just to speed things up a bit.

Now comes the fun part...figuring out a pattern! No math, no paper, no colored pencils needed! There's a really great app out there that does all the figuring for you! It's called Plannedpooling.com and it's super easy to use. You just click to add or subtract colors, pick your color and how many stitches long it is, and the app does the rest! You simply choose to add or subtract a stitch to the end of your rows to change the pattern of the pooling. It's fun to click through and watch the magic! Here's some of my favorite patterns I can do with this yarn.....

Neat, isn't it? One of these will result in that is 167 stitches wide, one will make something smaller, like a wide scarf at 55 stitches, and another is 223! All you have to do is make it the length it says, starting with the beginning of the first color, and your pattern will come out right! Of course, I am doing this counting each cluster of the granny stitch as 1 stitch in the app, so mine will come out really big. This is gonna be fun. I have a lot of variegated yarns I want to try out.

Have you made anything like this? Share with me! I'd love to see it!