Autumn doesn't arrive in Wyoming all at once. Sometimes it's a colder morning, a change in the light, or a little red where there wasn't red before.

Some greens arrive with spring and disappear almost as quickly. Others seem to have always been there—in pine needles, lichen, weathered landscapes, and the quiet colors we learn to live with.

A soft, sun-bleached gold inspired by late-summer Wyoming—dried grasses, weathered fence lines and the warm September light that turns the prairie to gold.

Some colors seem settled until the light changes. A dark blue becomes ink, slate, perhaps something softer—and reminds us how much can be waiting in something we thought we'd already seen.

Some yarn seems to arrive with a plan.

You can almost see the sweater or shawl before you've finished winding the skein.

Others leave the question open.

I've had Indian Paintbrush in the Copper Crow collection from the beginning, inspired by the Wyoming wildflower that scatters red, coral, orange and the occasional unexpected shade across hillsides and mountain meadows. But seeing those familiar colors on a bulky base changes them somehow.

They're bigger here. Warmer. Easier to follow from one stitch into the next.

And bulky yarn has a rhythm all its own. Cast on a few stitches and before long, something has begun.

A hat, perhaps. A cowl. A scarf for that first genuinely cold morning.

Maybe that's part of the pleasure of bringing home a skein before you've settled on the answer.

Sometimes it's enough to put the yarn on the table, open the notebook, and wonder what it might become.

There are colors in Wyoming that seem as though they shouldn't quite exist together.

Turquoise beside rust. Deep blue meeting gold. Green appearing for a moment between them.

At Grand Prismatic Spring, they don't sit neatly beside one another. Steam moves across the water, light changes, and the edges seem to shift while you're looking at them. You can take photographs, and you can remember the colors afterward, but neither quite holds the experience still.

Maybe that's part of what makes the place stay with you.

I have known the Grand Prismatic colorway for a while now. It was one of the first colors Shelly at Wicked Tint and I talked about, and it has always carried that particular piece of Yellowstone with it—not as a copy of the spring, but as a memory of seeing all those improbable colors together.

Then I saw it on the bulky base.

The colors were familiar, but something about them felt different.

Perhaps it was simply their scale. Those runs of turquoise, copper, mossy green, and blue had more room to show themselves against the substantial three-ply merino. The color I already knew suddenly had weight and texture.

It made me want to pick it up.

There is something wonderfully immediate about bulky yarn anyway. The stitches are generous. You can see the structure of them. A project begins becoming itself before you've had much time to wonder how long it will take.

And Grand Prismatic seems especially at home there.

A landscape remembered in color, translated into wool, waiting beside a pair of needles.

Sometimes bringing a little piece of Wyoming home is as simple as that.

Crow Note

Some colors stay with you long after you've left the place where you found them.

I've started to think Wyoming has its own way of introducing itself.

Not all at once.

You can drive the same road in June and again in August and wonder if you've somehow ended up somewhere new. The fence posts haven't moved. The hills are still exactly where they were. But somewhere between the long summer days and the first cool evenings, the prairie has quietly changed its clothes.

I never seem to notice it happening.

Only that it has happened.

A few days ago I was winding a skein of Prairie Gold from Wicked Tint Yarns when that same feeling found me again.

Before I even looked at the color name, I knew where my thoughts had wandered.

Out to a county road with the windows down.

To rabbitbrush blooming along the shoulder.

To grasses that seemed to catch every bit of the evening light.

It struck me that this wasn't really the color of sunshine.

It was the color sunshine leaves behind.

Maybe that's why certain places stay with us.

Not because we remember every detail, but because we remember how the light felt when we were there.

Somehow, that finds its way into the things we make, too.

Crow Note

Some light never really disappears.

It simply finds a quieter place to rest.

The brightest colors in Wyoming aren't always the ones that stay with me.

Sometimes it's the old fence post that's stood through fifty winters. Sometimes it's a weathered board on an abandoned ranch. Sometimes it's an old bone resting quietly beneath sagebrush, softened by years of sun and wind until only its quiet beauty remains.

Those places inspired one of my newest colorways—Weathered Cream.

I wrote a new Field Note about the colors time leaves behind, and why some of the most beautiful things in Wyoming aren't painted onto the landscape at all.

They're revealed.

Some places stay with you long after you've left them.

For me, Grand Prismatic Spring is one of those places.

This colorway was also the beginning of something else. It was the very first yarn I talked about with Shelly at Wicked Tint Yarns, long before Copper Crow Fiber Co. became a reality.

Some stories begin with a landscape.

Some begin with a single skein of yarn.

Read more about the inspiration behind Grand Prismatic and why this colorway means so much to me on the blog.

Some of Wyoming's most beautiful moments happen just before the rain arrives.

The wind shifts. The prairie glows. The sky becomes shades of blue that seem to exist for only a few quiet minutes.

That's the feeling behind Wyoming Storm, one of my favorite colorways from Wicked Tint Yarns. It's inspired by those peaceful moments when the landscape pauses between sunshine and rain.