Coned Cotton Yarn - Photo © Amy Solovay.

I went yarn shopping at Walmart last week, and found a few colors of worsted weight cotton coned yarn on sale for only $3.50 each. I got 3 14 oz. cones of variegated yarn at that price. Not bad. I would have bought even more if they'd had it. (They didn't.)

I can't guarantee that your local Walmart will have coned yarns on sale, or that it will even have coned yarns at all. If you're planning on making a trip there anyway, it might be worth checking the yarn aisle to see if you can find any, although I wouldn't recommend making a special trip just for that. By now, it is possible that all the bargain yarns have found happy homes.

Have you found any good yarn bargains in your neighborhood recently? If so, please give us the scoop on what you found and where you found it!

Colorful Cotton Yarns - Photo © Amy Solovay.

Think back to your childhood for a moment. Did you ever play with paints, or finger paints? You probably remember that mixing red with yellow makes orange, and mixing blue and yellow equals green. You might think that information doesn't help you much when it comes to crochet, though - you can't mix yarns in the same way that you can mix paints.

Potholder - Photo © Amy Solovay.

What you can do instead is use yarns together in a way that fools the eye into seeing color blends. For example, in these colorful potholders, there are rows in which you use two different colors, and it gives the illusion that the colors have been mixed together.

There are all kinds of amazing effects you can achieve using this simple idea. We'll be exploring that idea more in depth in future projects, but these potholders are fantastic introduction to the concept if it is new to you.

• See more close-up photos of this potholder
• Find a whole bunch more free crocheted potholder patterns

• See more "Wordless Wednesday" posts from around About.com
• Or, see even more Wordless Weds. blog posts from all over the Internet