Color

I spent some time this past weekend reading and thinking about color, as I started to plan out some hat/mitten/scarf sets, and I thought I would share some of what I learned with all of you. I have quite a stash of Caron's Simply Soft that I like to use for the sets, and I had bought some of the yarn during one of Herrschner's weekly sales because they were offering colors I hadn't seen before. However, when I looked at the stash I had amassed, I didn't quite know where to begin in putting the colors together!

So I dug around my craft room a little further, and I found a color wheel that I had purchased several years ago. I had never taken the time to use it, so I pulled it out and read the instructions. It is quite a tool. It is actually called a Rainbow Color Selector, and it is a bit more involved than a simple color wheel, although still easy to use. It shows shades of each color in the spectrum. In the center, the arrows, triangles, squares and rectangles help you to pick two, three, or four matching color combinations. You just need to pick your starting color, find it on the wheel, and go from there.

One of the Simply Soft colors that I had fallen in love with is called Seashell, and it is a sort of a sand color (although it looks more orange in the picture). I really didn't know what color to put with it, but the color wheel led me to the light blue I used in the swatch. (I used the Cross Hatch stitch to make the swatch, mostly to see what it would look like in two colors. If I use the stitch to make a scarf, however, I think I will work lengthwise, and use the color changes to make the start of the fringe. I tried carrying the colors up the side of the swatch, but the rows are too wide to do that successfully.) Anyway, getting back to the color wheel, if I had wanted to use a 3 color combination with the Seashell, the wheel suggested a light sage green and a light violet or orchid. I really wouldn't have picked those colors, but when I put the skeins together it did look lovely.

I also did some reading in Donna Kooler's Encyclopedia of Crochet and Pauline Turner's How to Crochet. Donna Kooler does a nice job of explaining some of the terms associated with color, like tone, shade and tint. Pauline Turner offers some very simple ways of introducing color into various crochet stitches. She also suggests that people often gravitate to one side of the spectrum or the other, prefering either the warm colors of brown, orange, red, or the cooler colors of blue, green, violet. I think that is very true, and I can tell you that I definitely prefer the cooler shades. I realized this when I rediscovered that crocheted scarf I mentioned on Monday. It is almost exactly the same color as the beaded scarf I showed you last Friday! (Sadly, the beaded scarf got frogged over the weekend. I couldn't tell where I was in the pattern, and I decided that I would start that one again some day, probably after I get new glasses - those little beads are really hard to see right now!) I am using the shell trellis stitch for the scarf, and between the lacy stitch pattern and the softness of the yarn (Cascade Success, an SF Alpaca/Mulberry Silk blend), I am having no problem with drape on this project!