How To Pick A Palette: Glow Yoke Sweater

Last week, we launched the Glow Sweater – you can get the pattern on Ravelry, our website, or in the Tin Can Knits app!

Ready to knit a Glow sweater? It’s a classic colourwork yoke, with lots of colour and charming, bauble inspired, motifs. Sometimes knitters are daunted by choosing a palette, especially with 5 colours, so here are a few of our tips on how to pick a palette.

It looks complex… but there are really only 2 things going on here

Let’s look at the colour palettes I put together, and strip them back to their basic components, so that you can do the same in building up your own palette.

A series of colourwork sweater yokes, one finished and two on the needles.

First of all, you should know that I went stash-diving for these projects… I dug into my (extensive 😬) stash, and picked some lovely sock-weight yarn that had been languishing for far too long. So the body colours were set by this; a speckled grey, a warm golden caramel, and a deep cozy brown.

Wait… there are 5 colours in each yoke… so what do you mean there are only 2 things going on?

Two contrast-colour pairs: a bright pair, and a deep pair

The Glow sweater has a main colour (MC) and 4 contrast colours (CCs). You’ll notice that the MC (the one I used for the body, sleeves, cuffs and hems) is not used at all in the colourwork at the yoke. This means that it’s pretty easy to combine your colourwork colours and your main colour, as long as it doesn’t clash TOO hard. So pick a MC that you like, and go from there, because you’ll almost certainly be able to find a palette that works with it. Since the MC isn’t part of the colourwork at the yoke, we can discard the main colour, for now, and move onto contrast colours.

In each of the three Glow sweaters that I worked, I picked a bright pair, and a deep pair. The ‘bright’ pair are both, as you’d expect, bright, and they have at least some contrast between them; they’re different hues. The ‘deep’ pair are both deeper than the brights, for suitable contrast of values so that the pattern ‘pops’. Let’s look at each of the 3 palettes.

Main colour – a neutral / cool grey
Bright pair – vivid green and vivid peachy orange have high contrast
Deep pair – deep magenta and dark maroon are a tonal pair
The finished palette glows!

I am calling this one ‘citrus’ because of the lime and grapefruit vibes. I’ve probably never been so excited by a colourwork palette in my life. Kidding. Kinda. It was the first one I made, and it convinced me that I’d knit to knit more than one…and more than two! My bright pairing is my lime and grapefruit, and my deeper pairing is that purply maroon and the deeper pink.

Next up, I reached for one of my go-to colourwork colours… a vivid cobalt blue. Cobalt is one of the two colours of the ‘deep’ pair, and with the caramel main colour I’d picked, it seemed like a bright yellow would work well within the ‘bright’ pair of the palette. I call this one ’em relies heavily on cobalt’. Swipe through the images below to see my palette develop.

Main Colour – warm caramel golden yellow
Bright pair – sunshine yellow and orangey peach
Deep pair – that vivid cobalt, and a moody deep teal
It all came together beautifully!
I maybe love this one even more than the ‘citrus’ yoke?

Now, I had been holding onto a sweater-quantity of this really exquisite sock-weight yarn from La Bien Aimee for really far too long. I bought it at an Edinburgh Yarn Festival back… was it before I had babies? Maybe. Or maybe it was when Max was 18 months old, and I was pregnant with Neve? Hard to say now. But I never quite took the plunge to make it into something, and the time had come!

SO… how do I do it?

Select a main colour that you love, and want to wear (or your friend or little one will). Then grab some colours you love and start playing! You’ll need a pair of bright colours, and these ones can have some contrast between them (like red and purple, yellow and orange, green and teal, pink and orange, yellow and purple…).

Next, you’ll need to pick a pair of deeper colours; colours that will have sufficient difference in tone / depth to contrast against both of those ‘brights’ so that the pattern pops. In this pair, I’d go for less contrast; more similarity. They can be different colours, but maybe make them neighbours on the colour wheel (these are called analogous colours)

Get knitting, and see how your palette works for real, on the needles. I like to ‘swatch on the needles’ after I’ve gotten my first pair working, to see how the palette might work in real life. I also recommend you be willing to rip back, and retry. Kintting a colourwork is a joy, so doing it 2 or 3 times is really just two. orthree times the joyful knitting, right?!