Knititude

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. 

Next: Finally: Zinnia!!

Color Trials, Part 2

Last week's post ended with many colors of yarn to play with. The above photo shows them in a different light than the photo I used at the end of my last post-- a good reminder that different light conditions can also affect how colors appear in photos and to the eye. The colors in the above photo are a little more saturated than they appear in real life.

I started experimenting with different color combinations, but rather than jumping right into knitting swatches, I first tried them out using Adobe Illustrator.

Illustrator has a library of color swatches, but it also has a spectrum that you can click on, and then you can take the resulting color and adjust the hue, saturation and lightness almost indefinitely, and save the resulting color as a new swatch to the color library. Although color charts or sketches can only approximate what a finished knitted colorwork swatch will look like, I figured that the closer I could get the Illustrator swatch colors to my yarn colors, the better idea I'd have of whether the various color combinations would work. (Hint: If using Illustrator for color charts, place the stitches for design and background in different layers so that you can easily change the color of all stitches in one chart component at once, without affecting other stitches.)

I now had seven custom colors added to my Illustrator color library (clockwise from top left in first photo): Robin's Egg Blue, Celery, Plum, Orchid, Magenta, Teal and Olive. As you can see from the above charts, these colors can be combined in many different ways (although all except two charts include the teal, since I wanted to use that for the body of my design). It is also immediately obvious from the charts that some color combinations provide much better contrast than others, notably the Plum/Celery (#4) and Magenta/Celery (#7). After playing around with these charts, I had a feeling that my favorite combo would be #2; I liked the muted contrast between Olive and Teal in the background, the subtle pop from the Orchid in the center, and finally, the Celery design seemed to stand out well enough against the Olive background. (And remember, the color combination to beat, or at least equal, was #1, which was what I had used for my similar book project.) 

The swatches that correspond to the charts are shown below. (I did my best to get the colors to show up accurately, but again they appear a bit more saturated than in real life.) No surprise that #4 and #7 have relatively high contrast, as well as #8 (which is the same as #7 but with Teal instead of Olive). I probably also should have been able to predict from the chart that #6 would have poor contrast within the design, although contrast between design and background is acceptable. What surprised me is that #2, my predicted favorite, looks rather dull and washed out, with less contrast between the Celery and Olive than I expected; I actually prefer #3.

Knitters with sharp eyes may note that in #3, the Olive stitches across the center were added in duplicate stitch; originally these were in Orchid, but I wasn't crazy about how that looked. Duplicate stitch is a good way to change a few stitches on a stranded swatch so the whole thing doesn't have to be re-knitted.

There does come a point in design development where the time and money invested yields diminishing returns, and I would say that I had reached that point. But since this will be a self-published design, I then asked myself: Several of these color combinations will work, but are any of them something that I would love to wear? And I'm afraid the answer was: Meh. 

What next? You guessed it-- more yarn.

 

Color Trials, Part 1

Although I love knitted colorwork and stranded or Fair Isle sweaters and accessories, I haven't created a lot of designs using multiple colors. Most of my stranded projects, like the Ferrovia collection or the Fish Isle Child's Pullover, use just two colors of yarn (although the latter uses a variegated contrast yarn, which is an easy way to add interest to simple colorwork). 

So I am really a novice when it comes to designing with multiple colors. I do have a couple of great reference books: The Art of Fair Isle Knitting by Anne Feitelson, and Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting.

(A few useful terms: "stranded knitting" and "Fair Isle" are often used interchangeably. Fair Isle is one of the Shetland Islands, which are part of Scotland, and is where Fair Isle knitting originated. "Stranded knitting" refers to a style of knitting with yarns of different colors, in which the yarns not being actively knitted are carried or stranded on the wrong side of the work, as in the above photo. In classic Fair Isle knitting, many colors may be used in a single garment, but only two colors are worked on any one round.)

Both of the above books discuss color theory and how to combine different colors at some length, but I will summarize the primary tenets for color knitting as follows:

1. Choose colors that look nice together.
2. Choose colors that have enough contrast so the design is visible.

#1 is somewhat a matter of personal taste, although as with sounds, colors do have inherent physical properties (wave length and all that) such that some combinations are naturally harmonious, and others, discordant. #2 is very important because without enough contrast, you might as well not go to the trouble of creating the design, since no one will see it! 

Of course it's not that simple to combine multiple colors in a pleasing way; you also have to consider how to transition between colors, which colors to use for background and which for the design, and where the focal point of the design should be (and how to use color to draw the eye there). But the crazy/fun/frustrating part is that it's not as simple as you might think to even achieve #1 and #2! Why? Because colors look different to the eye depending on what other colors are around them. 

I recently finished a design with a Fair Isle yoke for a book of knitting patterns that won't be published until Spring 2018. I had worked up several possible Fair Isle patterns for this knitted top, and really liked two of them, so I decided to use the 2nd place finisher (swatched below) in another (self-published) design. 

The colors I chose for the book project are shown in the swatch and also in the first photo; I used the olive green for the body. I didn't want to use the same colors for my self-published design, so I decided to use the teal for the body, and a different combination of colors for the yoke. 

The Brown Sheep Company was kind enough to provide their Cotton Fleece yarn (80% cotton, 20% wool) for my book project, but rather than ask them to send more, I purchased a few more colors of Cotton Fleece (see below).

Next week: More swatching...and more, and more...

 

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Colubrida Wrap

The Colubrida Wrap pattern appeared in the Interweave special issue Enchanted Knits 2014: Knits Fit for a Fairy Tale. The submission call for this issue, sent out in late 2013, stated:

    Be inspired by the generations who have imagined magical worlds filled with fairies and elves, spindles that can hop, skip, and jump, talking mirrors and magical handkerchiefs, witches and wizards, ghosts and giants, flying mortar and pestles and magical combs, and heroic journeys out into the world and within oneself.  

As it happened, I had recently been working on snake-themed ideas, since 2013 was the Chinese Year of the Snake. I had already completed the Nerodia Cardigan for Babies and Children and the Nerodia Cardigan for Women (above), but I had another idea that I liked, for a wrap that incorporated a snake motif. I had found the undulating lace stitch pattern in a Japanese stitch dictionary, and fiddled with it to create a head at one end and a tail at the other. I thought that this design would fit well with the theme of the magazine, and sent the submission into the editors with this description:

    “Colubrida” is the family name for many common snake genuses. Snakes have been featured in many different mythologies as a symbol of power, whether good or evil; I like to think of the serpent within this design as a sort of guardian, wrapped protectively around the wearer."

Above is a photo of the swatches I sent in with the submission, with the head end on the left, and below is a photo of the finished pattern sample, showing the snake's head (on the left) and tail (on the right). If you are feeling the urge to make one for yourself, the pattern is also available as a kit, with yarn included! (At the time of writing this post, the kit was "on sale," from $130.49 to $129.00-- a savings of a little over 1%. Not sure what that's about.)

 

It was fun to look through the magazine and see some of the other fanciful knits; three of my favorites, pictured below, were: Maleficent's Cloak by Vicki Square, the Hunger for Rampion Pullover by Jennifer Hagan, and the Honest Woodsman Pullover by Kathleen Danes. You don't often see a man with an ax in photos of knitwear! (Top photo and the three photos below are courtesy of Interweave Press.)

 

After this magazine was published and the sample was returned to me, I draped it on the mannequin in my office, and noticed one day that the head of the snake bears a passing resemblance to, well, a certain part of male anatomy. So I'm going to modify the pattern to remove one of the eyes from the head end, add a couple of pompoms to the tail end, call it the One-Eyed Trouser Snake Wrap, and offer said pattern in a kit with flesh-toned yarn... April Fool's! (I figured that anyone who reads this far at least deserves a laugh.)
 

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