The little symbols on a ball band are famously unmemorable, and the band goes in the bin long before the finished thing needs washing. Yarn Squirrel lets you record them once, against the yarn, and then carries them forward to whatever you make from it.
They’re the standard laundry symbols, in five groups: Washing, Bleaching, Drying, Ironing and Dry Cleaning.
You enter them yourself
Care instructions don’t come from Ravelry — Ravelry doesn’t have a field for them. You add them by hand, from the ball band, picking from each of the five categories.
It’s a minute’s work per yarn, and it’s the sort of thing you only do once.
One colourway is enough to inform the group
A yarn group shows the care symbols merged from all its colourways. So if you enter them for one ball of a yarn you own in six colours, the group shows them — you don’t have to repeat yourself five more times.
Where colourways disagree, the strictest instruction wins. If one says machine wash and another says hand wash only, the group says hand wash only. For something you might use together in one piece, the cautious answer is the useful one.
Editing the group applies to every colourway
Setting care on the group writes it to all the colourways in it. That’s the quick way to do a whole yarn at once, and the app tells you so before you save.
New colourways you add to the group start with the group’s care already filled in.
Your projects inherit it
A project works out its care instructions from the yarn you used, taking the strictest across all of them. A blanket in three yarns gets the most cautious of the three — which is the right answer, since you’ll be washing it as one object.
The project shows that it came from the yarn rather than from you. You can set a project’s care by hand instead, and then it keeps yours.
Symbols and words
Tap any symbol to see what it means in plain words, with temperatures. Useful for the ones nobody remembers — the triangle, the square with the line, the dot count inside the iron.
If your stash entry came from Ravelry, the care block is also written into that item’s notes on Ravelry, so the information is where you’d look for it there too.