Photos of my childhood home in Montana: the creek, the flock of Mallard ducks, the barn and grasses growing in the snow
Knitting, Winter Style!
It's getting colder now, and the days are getting shorter. I can tell winter hibernation is coming, because I'm starting to hoard chocolate already! Winter is not only one of my favorite times of year, it is my color palette. Strange, how we are instinctively drawn to the colors that suit us best. I even painted in winter colors in elementary school! Those stark colors drew me like a magnet.
You would think that my knitted garments would naturally reflect that color palette. I thought they did, until I posted all my finished projects on Ravelry. Looking at photos of 30 different garments together, I noticed something odd. Black, ice blue, royal purple, red--those are supposed to be my best winter colors. Yet I hardly saw any of those colors on my ravelry page!
There was plenty of white, which was good, and one sweater in an electric blue, which by a strange coincidence, my husband told me suited me better than any other sweater. The others were mostly in bland pastels. How odd is it that here I'm making clothing for myself, where I have absolute freedom to choose the colors that are most flattering for my complexion, but I end up with a bunch of pastels. Why?
Because I love to knit lace, that's why. The hand feel and the delightful mind puzzle of figuring out a lace pattern is unmatched by any other kind of knitting. Lace is much more visible in light colored yarn. So I've ended up with clothing that shows off my lace work, instead of showing off ME. How crazy is that? I'm not hanging the lace up on a wall, I'm wearing it!! It's time for a serious adjustment in color perspective!
Here are the colors that are almost entirely missing from my knitted wardrobe:
grey and silver, black, pure red, pine green, electric blue, cobalt, indigo, red and white, red and black.
The ironic thing is that I've surrounded myself with these colors, they're just not in my knitting wardrobe. I even grow flowers that flatter my complexion, but not my handmade clothes! The result is the color mishap below:
Eek! How did this happen?
I'll tell you how--I was being cheap! We all do it—we buy yarn on sale on the internet without seeing it first. Gee, the
color looks okay…. I think. Boy, do those photographs vary! Even when I go to 3
different sites & look at 3 different photographs of the same supposed ball
of yarn, I don’t know if I’m comparing the same dye lots, even. And which of
the 3 colors is the right one? The color of this sweater looked great in the tiny little photograph on the website, but look at the dreadful contrast with my skin tone! And that's in GOOD light. Look at this:
Aagh! Take it away! I can't bear to look!
Lesson
Learned: I have to take the effort to meet yarn in person before I even consider buying some of it later on the internet. My new ritual is this: I go to a store, finger
the yarn, & hold the ball up to the pale skin inside my wrist, & then
to my face, which will be more tanned—I have to use a pocket mirror for
this. Even better, I could ask for permission to take the ball of yarn out into
sunlight & bring a friend to give me a second opinion on the color match
with the shade of skin on my face. (At this point, I'm probably going to buy the yarn in the store from the helpful sales clerk!) As a winter, I have blue-toned skin, but
some blues, greens & pinks look far better on my skin than others. Here is an interesting point of comparison. The sweater below is knit in the same yarn as the icky one above. Granted, the shaping of the sweater isn't great, but look how much better the electric blue color suits my winter complexion, than that dreadful purple/brown!
One shortcut you can use if you're not sure if the yarn suits you is to hold it up next to another color that you know looks good on you. Do they match? For example, black is my best color. Look at the mismatch between the black and the brown/purple from my icky sweater above:
it's obvious now that the purple isn't in my color palette!