Polkamania! Rainbow Edition

I’m so happy my last post resonated with some of you. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of play in my life and in my designs, and it’s encouraging to hear that some of my ideas and practices are helpful to you too.

This post is a little more knitting specific though there’s still plenty of playing, as that’s key to how this design came about. When I wrote about Playing with Colour for the KDD&Co. Allover Club, I mentioned my Polkamania! cowl. One of Kate’s readers got in touch to ask about the rainbow version of this cowl and I realised I’d never really talked about it here.

Today I shall correct that omission, ably illustrated by some fantastic photos of the cowl in action taken by Astrid Johnston in one of Niela’s awesome sheds (of which more another time).

Buckle up for some rainbowtastic, spotty, creative joy (and some stranded colourwork nerdery, ahem).

I love this cowl and wear it very often, along with this magnificent black linen dress from People Shop, of which I am inordinately fond, and that is known around here as THE dress. It’s swingy and feminine enough to twirl in, while being gloriously unfussy and having proper big deep pockets. I think it looks great with my most colourful knits. BUT BACK TO THE COWL…

This rainbow cowl is the product of several ‘what if’ creative moments and ideas building on one another over several years. Let’s start with my first experiments with stranded colourwork design and my early understanding of options for shading sequences. By shading sequence, I mean the different sets of yarn shades used to knit the Background and the Pattern in any stranded colourwork design.

When you are sequencing shades for stranded colourwork – particularly if you are working with the kinds of symmetrical, geometric shapes commonly found in Shetland patterns – there are broadly four options for sequencing shades as you knit them. Moving from the edge to the centre of your motif, shades can be arranged like this (diagram reads 1. – 4., clockwise from top left):

1. Pattern: dark to light; Background: light to dark.
2. Pattern: dark to light; Background: dark to light.
3. Pattern: light to dark; Background: light to dark.
4. Pattern: light to dark; Background: dark to light.

Because it’s a LOT to see all that at once, let’s look at each channel separately in my four examples. Starting with the shading sequences for the Pattern shades:

1. Pattern: dark to light.
2. Pattern: dark to light.
3. Pattern: light to dark.
4. Pattern: light to dark.

Now looking at the Background shades, separate from the Pattern shades:

1. Background: light to dark.
2. Background: dark to light.
3. Background: light to dark.
4. Background: dark to light.

Now, bringing it all together:

1. Pattern: dark to light; Background: light to dark.
2. Pattern: dark to light; Background: dark to light.
3. Pattern: light to dark; Background: light to dark.
4. Pattern: light to dark; Background: dark to light.

You can also flip which set of shades you use for Background and Pattern, like so:

This is a massive oversimplification and there are many other factors to consider but please bear with me. In years of poring over beautiful Shetland knitting, trying to understand how the magical shimmering effects are created, my observation has been that many gorgeous Fair Isle designs use one or two – or sometimes several – of the above variants.

Thinking about dark and light is a bit easier when we are working with gradient yarn sets, in which you have just one colour (hue) in different darks and lights (values). John Arbon’s wonderful Knit By Numbers yarn range is the perfect thing for exploring these ideas, and it was experimenting with this range that led me to my first creative ‘what if’ moment.

What if, instead of exploring shading sequences from dark to light within a single motif, I spread the investigation across the whole canvas of a cowl? Instead of using just two rows of a motif to see how the lightest Pattern shade interacts with the darkest Background shade, and so on, I could give each yarn combination from the shading sequence IT’S OWN CHUNK OF COWL! I wasn’t sure at all how such an experiment would work, but I know from many years of being a devout polka-dot fan that if I stuck dots on this experiment, I would love it. I knew that – whatever happened – I would end up with an incredible colour-study of yarn-shade interactions THAT WAS ALSO COVERED IN SPOTS.

Seeing no down-side to this outcome, I cast on and produced the original Polkamania! cowl – the pattern for which includes a detailed description of how the shading sequences work.

This schematic shows the colour shifts and hopefully you can see, reading from right to left and bottom to top, how the lights and darks move in simultaneous and opposite directions on each half of the cowl.

I found I loved this systematic approach – enough structure that the end product wasn’t a total mystery, but enough unknowns that knitting each little section was a happy revelation. It was also an extremely soothing, rhythmic knit, and working on it had a pleasingly episodic “just to the end of this bit” vibe. Knits like this provide ample time to think and, as I worked on the original Polkamania! sample, I had my next ‘what if’ moment.

What if, instead of using two light to dark sequences, I created two rainbow sequences: one darker rainbow and one pastel rainbow? I knew I wanted to use exuberant Crayola-style colours and that I could make my rainbow using Jamieson & Smith 2 ply Jumper Weight yarn. I put together the following sets of rainbow yarn and immediately cast on Polkamania! again (please note, shade 44 has been discontinued).

Darker Rainbow
A – 1403
B – 125
C – 23
D – 118
E – 18
F – 20

Pastel Rainbow
G – 9097
H – 90
I – 96
J – 141
K – FC15
L – 44

I’d learnt with the original Polkamania! that you can get away with very low contrast between Background and Pattern shades with the continuous and quite solid motif of my polka dot design. Even when I have two light and very similar shades beside one another in the cowl you can still see the dots. This gave me confidence that my two rainbows would work, however little contrast there might be between some of the shades. You can see here how even in a part of the cowl where I was working the lightest orange with the lightest grey brown, the dots are still visible!

I plugged my two rainbows into the template I’d created with my previous Polkamania! cowl.

I love the result: my rainbow cowl of dreams plus THE dress has been one of my favourite winter uniforms, and I’m really intrigued by some of the colour combinations that his project yielded. 23 (a nice citrusy yellow) looks especially good, I feel, with the soft and subtle grey green jade of one of my favourite shades – 141.

Best of all, both these projects led to other ‘what if’ moments that have continued to spiral outward into other new projects. As I was knitting the original Polkamania! cowl, I kept yearning to use the tasty gradients in a more traditional way – a creative urge that I satisfied when I worked on Flombre accessory set, for the Colour to Knit eBook.

We structured the book with my gradient project as a kind of stepping stone to Bev’s show-stopping Japonica wrap. This is because creating shimmery complex shading sequences in stranded colourwork begins with a solid understanding of values and how darks and lights interact – something that can be a little simpler to understand when working with gradient sets than when putting together your own shading sequences and also incorporating a lot of different colours (hues).

Knitting Polkamania! twice also gave me confidence in the cowl as the canvas PAR EXCELLENCE for complicated and sequential stranded colourwork projects where you want a wearable outcome – a concept on which I built when I designed the Think Like An Artist cowl (Ravelry link) for my Knit Stars Masterclass.

Finally, I realised with these projects just how helpful systems can be for limiting and structuring the infinite possibilities of colour play.

As a final note and for a laugh I want to show you – by way of illustrating the importance of values (relative dark/light) where more traditional stranded colourwork designs are concerned – what would happen if I used my Crayola crayon colours to knit the motifs I used earlier on as a way to demonstrate the interactions of light and dark within a chart:

1. Pattern: dark to light; Background: light to dark.
2. Pattern: dark to light; Background: dark to light.
3. Pattern: light to dark; Background: light to dark.
4. Pattern: light to dark; Background: dark to light.

…and the same, with the sequences flipped.

See how the motif just totally melts and disappears in places because of the lack of contrast between Pattern and Background shades?

That’s why value matters, folks, when it comes to picking out yarns and shading sequences for our stranded colourwork designs!
YOURS IN EXPERIMENTS WITH SHADING SEQUENCES –
Fx

Links
Learn more about Stranded Colourwork Design in my Flagship course, The KNITSONIK System (now with a five-month payment plan option to spread the cost, and a limited subscription option that I am trying out).
Get Polkamania! here or here (Ravelry link).
See different colourways of Polkamania! here.