A study in colour

I never learned colour theory beyond the basic RYB and complementary colours taught in primary school. This hasn’t been an issue for the last 35 and a bit years of my life, but this month I decided to make myself a colourwork jumper and found that I had no idea which shades to choose.  I suspect my lack of knowledge is why I so often go for rainbows; there’s no wrong option if you just use every colour at once! I don’t want a rainbow jumper this time though so I borrowed some books from the library to learn more about what will and won’t work.

The first was ‘The Colour code’ by Paul Simpson, which wasn’t helpful at all. It explains what the different colours ‘mean’ and how they’ve been used throughout history. Interesting, yes, but no good for working out what to use for my jumper.

Next up was ‘Kevin McCloud’s Colour Now’, which was slightly more useful as it’s like a catalogue of different palettes, with a brief overview of the theory in the last few pages. It’s meant for interior design so the examples are all a bit wishy washy for my liking but it’s good for a general idea of which shades work together.

And finally, I got ‘Colour Confident Stitching’ by Karen Barbé and this is exactly what I was looking for. It goes over colour theory in detail without getting too technical, and has step by step instructions for generating different palettes from images and words. It’s written for DMC threads but colour is colour and it all applies to yarn as well.

One of the example pages set off every happy neuron in my brain so I’m definitely going to use that palette for a project at some point, although I don’t think it’s what I want for this jumper.  It has given me enough information to start choosing colours for my jumper and I’m looking forward to getting started with it.

Hannah

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