What are the chances?!

I purchased 13 balls of yarn in Paris, Ontario at the Mary Maxim store in spring - and used 10 to make the top red sweater in the picture below.

Would the leftover 3 skeins be enough to make a sleeveless vest? I decided to go ahead and start. If I didn’t have enough red yarn, I could add a stripe or two in a contrasting color. I knew I could find the same brand of yarn in Ottawa, but it would no doubt be a different dye lot - a slightly different shade of colour - which could spoil the look of the vest.

Lying on the bed with the sweater, this is how the vest looked a few days ago…

The time had come to think about getting more yarn… The one skein I had left would likely not be enough.

I brought the sweater to a neighborhood yarn store. I also brought the yarn label so that I could check the dye lot number if I found the same shade of red.

Dye lot numbers are very important when buying yarn. When yarn is dyed, every skein created from the same vat of dye has the same “dye lot” number. Different dye lots can have slight differences in color that are noticeable enough to spoil the look of a garment.

Imagine my amazement when I checked the yarn labels in the store and discovered that the red Patons tweed (in an Ottawa wool shop called Wool-Tyme) had exactly the same dye lot number as the yarn I had purchased in the Mary Maxim store store 500 kilometres away!

What are the chances?!

Of course, I immediately bought the skein… I couldn’t believe my good luck!