Consulting the Experts
Maybe we don’t think about it every day, but we are surrounded by the work of color experts. Fashion, food, craft magazines, advertisements, variegated yarns, and print fabrics are created for maximum appeal. Creators want you to buy them, so they make them beautiful.
We can borrow their color expertise!
For my study of yellow, I gathered magazines that were destined for the recycling bin. When I saw attractive photos and ads with yellow in them, I tore them out.
I ended up with a lot of pages that featured yellow, turquoise, and blue. That summery combination reminds me of swimming pools and sunny beaches with turquoise waters.
Maybe it wasn’t strictly necessary, but it was fun to make this collage…
…and these swatches.
Intarsia cables are kind of a pain, but they look so nice…
As yarn lovers, we’re very familiar with variegated or multicolor yarns. Yarn manufacturers consult experts, predict fashions, and they pick the colors they think will appeal to the most consumers. The same goes for fabric manufacturers.
Go ahead—borrow their expertise!
Lion Brand’s Lion Ribbon (probably discontinued now) combines yellow with vibrant pink and blue. Small amounts of green, orange, and violet appear between the major colors. I tried to use similar proportions of solid colors in my knitted sample.
The pattern is Barbara Walker’s “String of Pearls,” most likely from her Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns.
Next time: “A Suffusion of Yellow” (Thank you, Douglas Adams.)
