Saturday, October 4, 2014

Fox Paws and Color Choice

If you're one of the many people who has started knitting Fox Paws in the last few weeks, you know that there are certain advantages to using 5 colors of yarn. They generally look good because there are so many of them. In any case, the questions have been coming in about what to pick, how I picked my colors, and how to arrange them in the best order.  I'm posting this to show a bit of color theory and process behind my decisions. I'd like to encourage all of you to add some advice that you have for other knitters as well.

How did I pick my colors? Let me explain.
For the first sample, I picked in a dark yarn store that carries a lot of special colorways I picked 5 out of about 12 colors they had. the other colors were aqua, watermelon, black, white, and a few grays. You can see why I ended up with these 5.
You can see that I picked matching markers out and drew up some stripe arrangements. If, like most people, you do not have a set of 300 different colored markers, you can use pencils, crayons, or the computer to pick an order. Colourlovers.com has a great 5 color palette tool to help you.
After realizing that only one of these colors is commercially available and that I'm terribly allergic to the yarn, I had to choose new colors.

I have 3 tips for ordering colors based on digital images.
1. Don't
2. If you must, order a color card to see the yarn colors in person first.
3. If you are on a tight deadline like I was and cannot wait for a color card, base your choices on what works for others who posted projects in the ravelry database for that yarn.

Basically, I got lucky. I still like the first group better for my wardrobe.

When it comes to arranging the order of your colors, you need to look ad it's two direct neighboors and the color in position of stripes 2 and 5  next to eachother. The color in stripe 2 will also be the wide stripe. If you don't like this order, you could also use stripe 3 as the wide stripe (on the left of the marker drawing) and change the color order suggested in the pattern.

The question of color order is completely subjective, look for what you want to see. I've made these examples folllowing the color sequence in the pattern showing what happens when you use the same colors in a different order. There are 6  different color studies.


This should be enough to get you all started.

Have fun playing with colors and remember that you can always swatch first.

1 comment:

  1. hi! Did you use the colourlovers website to create those color studies?

    ReplyDelete

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