Color Trials, Part 3

In Color Trials Part 2, I added three new colors to the four colors I had originally chosen for a design for a book of knitting patterns, and did a bunch of swatching. None of the swatches was quite what I was looking for, so I got out my color cards (I cut them up so I could see different colors next to each other), and purchased four MORE colors of yarn, which can be seen in the photo below, at the top left and middle, and the middle center and right: Apricot, Terra Cotta, Lilac and Cotton Ball.

I placed the skeins of yarn in various color groups before deciding which combos to chart, and eliminated some of the possible combinations before working up more Illustrator charts.

Here are the charts I created using all of the colors, and the corresponding swatches; the newest ones are in the bottom row. (#1 and #9 are the same except that the top and bottom bands of Olive in #1 have been eliminated in #9; the same colors show up differently in #9 because I cut/pasted it from another photo. Pale gray chart squares indicate "no stitch" because of decreases within the charts.)

My first thought was that I am a slow learner, because chart #10 has pretty low contrast-- and so does swatch #10! In my defense, I thought the colors were pretty together, and I was hoping that the yarn colors would show up a bit differently than the charted colors. No such luck-- although using all of those colors as background, and brighter and/or darker colors for a design, could be interesting.

I did like the clean, bright look of #11-- I think I was getting sick of the yellow-green of Celery. The Lilac and Orchid in #11 tend to blend together, so I considered just using three instead of four colors and dropping the Lilac-- but I also liked the way the muted Lilac adds a bit of depth. And I was getting sick of swatching, so I decided to forge ahead.

However, once I got the yoke partially completed, it became clear that my swatches had not showed an important element-- the transition areas between the flowers. Once these areas were visible, I started to see something I had not planned: anchors! Teal anchors that stood out clearly against the other colors.

And since anchors and flowers don't make a lot of sense together, I had to rework my chart and/or rethink color placement.