Pondering Palettes? Here’s Our Best Tip

Facing a wall of colorful skeins—whether it be in an LYS or online—and planning a project is a delicious experience, but it can also be anxiety inducing depending on the project. How will the colors look when knitted? Will the stitch pattern pop in that color you love? Is that third step in your color-fade sequence too abrupt? Most of these quandaries come down to contrast.

The Color Tool You Already Own

Contrast, which in this case we might describe as the juxtaposition of colors, determines how our stripes and motifs pop and even what part of a project we focus on first. (Think hot pink heels and toes on otherwise subdued gray socks.)

Contrast in our knits often depends more on value—the relative lightness or darkness of a color—than the hue itself. Checking for value and contrast when our yarns are still in skeins can help us predict the success of a color combo when knitted. If only there was a handy tool to help!

Putting a black-and-white filter on the image at the top of the page reveals the value of each color and the contrast between them.

We’ve pulled a clip to share with you from our new video course, A Twist on Color: Knitting Self-Striping & Marled Yarns where Jenny Monteleone demonstrates using her phone’s camera to reveal value and contrast. Jenny—a designer and LYS owner—has a great eye for color and loads of experience helping knitters find their best palettes.

This is especially useful when planning colorwork knitting, stripes, intarsia, gradients, fades—just about any time you are using more than one color. Using a smartphone image filter is just so easy—I hope you’ll give it a try!

—Kate

Have you fallen in love with color-shifting yarns that transition from one hue to the next as you knit? Learn to make the most of these one of-a-kind skeins—and go behind the scenes of a small farm mill that crafts each one by hand in the video course A Twist on Color: Knitting Self-Striping and Marled Yarns.

Included in the course:

4 Episodes totaling 64 minutes of video

• Episode 1: Feederbrook Farm & Breed-Specific Yarn
• Episode 2: Developing Colorful Custom Yarns
• Episode 3: A Knitter’s View of Self-Striping Yarns
• Episode 4: Planning a Colorful Knitting Project

Plus!
Additional resources and helpful links for each episode and the bonus knitting pattern, The Clover Ridge Cowl.