Are you overwhelmed when choosing yarn because of all the amazing colour choices? I recently did a deep dive into knitting the same pattern in a variety of yarns and accidently  completed a study in colour that can unravel the mystery of choosing between solids, semis, hand dyed variegated, speckled, and handspun!

Here’s the same hat pattern knit with a variety of yarns:

SOLIDS:  A good place to start, especially if you’ve ever wondered why more than half of our store offerings are in solid colours! The quick and dirty: solids showcase the stitch pattern beautifully, putting the focus on the texture of the garment. But don’t be fooled: solid can contain multitudes.

There’s the flat, predictable solid of the machine dyed, batch-specific offerings. These are the workhorse colours that are reliable and allow you to choose a tone and then truly focus on the garment. Not only dyed by machine, but many indie hand dyers offer a clean single colour in a skein keeps things simple, allowing the knit or crochet stitch to shine.

TONALS: But semi-solids is where my heart sings. Often produced by hand dyeing or batch-dyeing, though some are commercially-dyed, these are when you see various tones of a colour. This can be done by varying how much dye of a single colour gets absorbed by various parts of the skein, or can be layered with nuances of multiple colours and result in giving much more depth to your garment; though may also somewhat distract. regardless, they are always more fun to knit as you watch the various tones run through your fingers.

And you can push the ‘colour family’ of tonals where similar saturated depths of different colours can also trick the eye as seeing a tone of one colour, where the stitch definition is still relatively sharp and kept as the focal point while painting your garment canvas in multiple colours!

VARIEGATED: Often when people first come to our store they are surprised that we have less selection of truly variegated colourful offerings. When you mix a variety of colours into a single skein specifically in larger blocks of colour, much of the time you get a variegated skein that will act in one of two ways: work up as a wild flurry of colours, or create tie-dyed style pools of colour, OR some combination of both. These are a fun choice and can elicit ‘feelings’ such as certain flowers or landscapes. They come with a warning though: the wilder the colour varigation, the harder it is to make out the stitch pattern of your garment.

Note: The pooling occurs when a pattern repeat (or row) happens at the same rate as the block of dyed colour in the loop of an unwound skein. This can be best seen in yarns when skeins are laid out in their original loops, and you can see the blocks of colours dyed into them. The fun part about this is that with enough experimenting you can actually ‘force-pool’ to come out as blocks of colour in your garment rather that the whirlpool that happens when the colours do not line up while being  worked up!

SPECKLE DYED: Often done by hand, there is a way to pull a variety of colours into a single skein and get a more cohesive, or smooth distribution of colours throughout a garment and that is a dyeing technique called speckle dye.

If the dyer more evenly distributes colour throughout the skein during the dyeing process, or adds slighter sections or even speckles of colours throughout the loop that that the yarn is strung into, you can get a colourful garment without the jarring effect that comes with a more traditionally variegated skein. It can distract from a pattern, so worth experimenting with pattern-yarn pairings when working with a more complicated stitch pattern to test how well the combination works for what you want your garment’s focus to be.

HAND-SPUN EFFECT: There’s also skeins that come with various plies of different colours; usually handspun, but this can also be machine made as dyed in the wool, meaning that the fibre was dyed in different colourways BEFORE plying the strands together. This creates a barber-pole in the yarn which may be consistent throughout (such as a marled) or each ply can move through different colours creating a variety of colour outcomes in the finished object. The latter is often a bit of a crapshoot as to what you are going to get [unless you do a good amount of homework in post-production colour predicting] and can be fun! However usually, this works best with a simple knit design where the colour is the focus, and one would steer clear of this where you want your eye to make out the stitch pattern.

*****

It’s fun to see how the same pattern looks in various dyeing techniques so you can perhaps guess what a colour will work up from skein to garment. There’s other colour production techniques that I didn’t include in the knitting of these hats that are worth a shout-out!

HEATHERED: Then you have your heathered which can be either machine made or hand-produced to add a bit of depth into your solid. Heathering is produced by adding a small amount of a different fibre content into the wool when spun that absorbs the colour differently than the rest of the skein.

COMBINATION HAND DYED: The beauty of the hand-dyeing process is that it is truly an artistic practice. Each of the above techniques and fibre-types can be combined to create various palettes for us to play with. For example, when combining tonals with splashes of colours (such as seen in typically variegated offerings) but spread more evenly throughout the skein you can get brilliant combinations of distributions of colour balanced with pops (and in this case even some pooling)… check out this beanie knit with a skein of La Bien Aimée Merino Aran which is colourful without compromising stitch definition:

To be clear: there is no right of wrong, better or worse when it comes to choosing colours for your bespoke custom hand-made garment! Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder; but it always good to know what to expect so you can decide how you would like to pair a beautiful skein of yarn with the right pattern that will make the lucky person who wears it most content! I wish you many happy colour choosing adventures and hope this helped shed some light on how to pair your next project!