Knititude

Bethel Tank

The Bethel Tank is one of the three projects in Knitted Tanks and Tunics that uses more than one color of yarn (the others are the Roanoke Tank and the Beverly Tank)-- but the only one that uses the stranded or Fair Isle technique. In this technique, many colors may be used, but traditionally only two colors are used in any one row or round.

For stranded designs, the color choices are all-important: when combining yarn colors, a particular color displays very differently depending on the adjacent hues. Traditionally, Fair Isle knitters use a fingering (#1 super fine), Shetland wool yarn such as Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift, which comes in over 200 colors! The Brown Sheep Company makes a similar yarn, Nature Spun, from U.S. sourced and spun wool, which comes in over 80 colors, but since Bethel is primarily a warm-weather garment, I decided to use Brown Sheep's Cotton Fleece yarn for this project. Cotton Fleece is 80% cotton and 20% merino wool AND it comes in over 60 colors. It's also a borderline DK/worsted (#3 light/#4 medium) weight, so it knits up much faster than a fingering weight yarn. And finally, I was already familiar with Cotton Fleece, having used it for the Sherwood child's pullover, one of my first published designs, back in 2006.

I used Brown Sheep color cards to choose the yarn colors, found a few suitable stranded motifs in Alice Starmore's Charts for Color Knitting (highly recommended!), and then I did a lot of swatching, arranging the colors in different ways. I ended up with two favorite motifs, and I went with the one that I thought would have more of the effect of a necklace in the finished design.

Bethel's stranded yoke is worked in the round from the bottom up, and then stitches are picked up from the lower (cast-on) edge and worked down for the body. I used short rows to shape the top of the front and back along the edge of the yoke, so that it keeps its natural round shape. One of the advantages of working top-down is that the top can be tried on while work is in progress, to check the placement of waist shaping as well as the finished length. The hem, neck and armholes of Bethel are all finished with an attached I-cord, which creates a simple, clean edge.

One word of caution: The darker colors of Cotton Fleece can bleed if washed in warm or hot water, so take care to use cold water when washing!

(all photos copyright Tom Moore Studios)

*I used the runner-up stranded motif for the Zinnia Tank, also worked in Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece.

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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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