Tag: knitting

Choosing Colors

Leave a comment

A tip for choosing colors, especially colors for stripes or other types of patterns, that I learned in either my color theory class or my first photoshop class: take a picture and desaturate it to black and white.

Five skeins of neon yarn on a light wooden table: blue, pink, green, magenta, and purple from left to right. A speckled black skein sit above them.
Black and white version of the photo above with five skeins of yarn lined up with a sixth, smaller skein above them. The five skeins of yarn are in order of medium, medium, light, dark, dark

A bit easier to do now than it was back then when it involved actually getting out a digital camera, taking a picture, importing it to photoshop, and then changing the color. And I acknowledge that I was lucky to be able to do that a bit over a decade ago. Imagine that same process with black and white film and having to either develop it or take it to Walgreens. Yeah, pretty sure no one would do that.

Five skeins of neon yarn on a light wooden table: blue, magenta, pink, purple, and magenta from left to right. A speckled black skein sit above them.
Black and white version of the photo above with five skeins of yarn lined up with a sixth, smaller skein above them. The five skeins of yarn are in order of dark, dark, medium, dark, light

I was able to make each of these pictures in a matter of seconds right on my phone, and it makes all the difference. This shows you which ones are similar tones and can help you get whatever effect you are going for.

Five skeins of neon yarn on a light wooden table: purple, pink, magenta, green, and blue from left to right. A speckled black skein sit above them.
Black and white version of the photo above with five skeins of yarn lined up with a sixth, smaller skein above them. The five skeins of yarn are in order of dark, medium, dark, light, dark

I wanted contrast in my stripes, so I chose this order. If I had wanted more of a gradient, even with the bright colors, I could’ve rearranged the first group to pull the lightest out of the center and place it to the end.

Find me on Ko-Fi, Instagram, Ribblr, Etsy, and Twitter.

Knit Cotton Tee Shirt – Finished!

Leave a comment
This shirt started from a tutorial posted by Lauren of Motherofpurl1 on Instagram on how to do an I-cord cast on. I knew immediately I needed to make a shirt with one, and I had a good handful of this DMC Natura yarn left in my stash from a trip to France about 8 years ago.

I wasn’t sure about getting the collar over my head, so I decided to add a small keyhole opening to the back and left myself a long enough tail to crochet a small chain of a few stitches to act as a buttonhole. I even had a near-perfect match of a tiny button in my button bin. (And the opening ended up being completely unnecessary, but it’s cute)

I used each yarn until I ran out of what I had left, hence the uneven stripes. But I managed to have similar enough amounts to make it look like the stripes are intentionally large and small like that.

I ended the bottom and the sleeves with just some 2×2 ribbing and my usual bind off of Jeny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bind Off. Because of the natural yarn restrictions, I did the sleeve edges right after connecting the body at the underarm before using the rest of the pink yarn in the body.

I did very minimal shaping at the chest, just a few increases above and decreases below on the front, plus a few increases at the sides of the hips, but mainly the body is just plain stockinette after the raglan sleeves.

This was just a stash-busting project for myself and not an actual design, but it was a fun “mindless” knit between a bunch of design projects and a test project for another designer.

Find me on Ko-Fi, Instagram, Ribblr, Etsy, and Twitter.