I’ve already talked a bit here on how to choose your colours for colourwork knitting. For this particular project, I wanted an overall cohesive look. But it gets difficult to achieve when you have to match both seven colours together with high contrast colourwork requirements! So I opted for the safe bet with pink-red-orange shades.
If you’re having trouble to choose your colours for a particular colourwork project, my advice is to sort all of your yarn in colour families. Then, pick your favourite(s) one(s) and work from here. I knew I wanted to use the Coquelicot orange from Le Chat qui Tricote and the Aimée’s Shawl speckled yarn from La Bien Aimée. These two yarns acted as foundation bricks of my contrasting yarn palette. Once I set my mind on a good number of colours, I was able to easily pick background colours which have enough contrast with all the foreground ones and still stay in the overall colour scheme.
Then came the swatches.
Even if I was uber-confident about my first choice of colours, it turns out it was a no-go. I’m glad I took the time to knit a bazillion few swatches! My first choice was to pair my two loved yarns with an orange Koigu and a deep burgundy The Uncommon Thread. Big mistake! For sure, I had enough contrast to have the colourwork pattern showing up. But these two rich and deep colours where masking my lovely Coquelicot one because I neglected to match the hue of my yarns!
Matching Coquelicot with Amour and Grenadine was so much better! Indeed, all these three yarns from Le Chat qui Tricote share the same hue and saturation of colours which means they’re not competing one with another. My last contrasting colour was then easily picked up as Bart & Francis Tangerine colour feature all the tones you can find in the others. A match made in heaven!
The final selection
In case you’re you’re wondering about the specific yarns I chose, here are the yarns that’ll make it in the sample:
- C1 = La Bien Aimée MCN Light, col. Aimée’s Shawl
(80% Merino, 10% Nylon, 10% Cashmere goat – 400 m / 437 yds per 100 g skein) - C2 = The Uncommon Thread Tough Sock, col. Spumoni
(80% Blue Faced Leicester, 20% Nylon – 366 m / 400 yds & 100 g per skein) - C3 = Bart & Francis MerinoSock, col. Tangerine
(75% merino fine, 25% polyamide – 425 m / 465 yds & 100 g per skein) - C4 = (Vi)laines Chaussettes, col. Jeter des perles aux cochons
(75% superwash wool, 25% nylon – 400 m / 437 yds & 100 g per skein) - C5 = Le Chat qui Tricote Féline, col. Amour
(100% Merino – 400 m / 438 yds & 100 g per skein) - C6 = Le Chat qui Tricote Féline, col. Coquelicot
- C7 = Le Chat qui Tricote Féline, col. Grenadine (discontinued)
All of these yarns will be used in a colourwork pattern, that bit you know about it.
But, can you guess what kind of pattern it will be?
Stay tuned for the first clue of our MKAL on 1 June 2018!
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