Occasionally a pattern, yarn or project appears twice — or you spot an empty gap where a card should be. It looks alarming and it’s almost always harmless.
Why it happens
It comes from two devices meeting for the first time. If you add the same pattern on your iPhone and your iPad before iCloud has told each about the other, both make their own copy. Neither is wrong; there are just two of them.
This is why it tends to show up right after you set up a new device, and almost never otherwise.
What Yarn Squirrel does about it
Every time you open the app, it looks for records that are really the same thing and merges them. Merging keeps the richer of the two — the one with more filled in — and copies anything the other one had before letting it go. Your projects are moved onto whichever copy survives, so nothing is orphaned.
You don’t have to do anything. Duplicates generally disappear the next time you open the app.
Merging never chooses between two things that might genuinely be different. If you’ve deliberately imported two PDFs of the same pattern, both are left exactly as they are.
Gaps in the grid
A gap is usually the same story seen from the other side: a record that arrived without the information needed to draw its card yet. Once iCloud finishes delivering, or the automatic tidy-up runs, the card fills in.
If a gap is still there after a few launches, get in touch — that one we’d like to see.