The Virtue of Value

What’s Happening?

After admiring the pattern for quite some time and receiving some money as a Mother’s Day gift from my first-born with explicit instructions to spend it at my local yarn shop, I went to Coast to Coast and purchased the yarn for Andrea Mowry’s gorgeous cowl pattern The Shift.

This is one of those projects that is complete brain candy for the go-with-the-flow types and good therapy for those of us who feel the need to plan and arrange all the details of life, because it matches and combines 3 skeins of yarns that shift colors independently throughout their yardage. The only way to control how the colors will play together is to obsessively snip out sections of each skein and pair them according to a personal master plan of appropriate color pairings and movements from one hue to the next.

I know some knitters make choices to do that very thing, and if you must, you must. However, I think there’s something wonderful in the process of making the choices of the yarns you find generally pleasing and right together, and then letting go and seeing what happens and finding beauty in the results, however they develop. There’s probably some deeper truth in there to examine without even having to dig very deep. (That degree in Philosophy has to be good for something, right?)

What am I learning?

I had a lovely visit with Erin at Coast to Coast as she helped me find the 3 skeins I chose, and she had some great advice to share as she’s quite familiar with the pattern. We talked about the importance of finding skeins with a lot of contrasting colors, which I think comes pretty naturally when most knitters approach colorwork. We want to make sure we can tell that we’re working with two different colors (or “hues” to be technical) when we hold them up side by side.

But Erin showed me a great method for also checking for contrast in value. In case you (like me) need a little art class refresher, “value” refers to how light or dark a hue is. When you do colorwork in knitting, you want a contrast in value as well as in hue so that you can see the different stitches easily. It’s more difficult to distinguish a dark green stitch in a field of navy blue stitches than it would be to distinguish that same dark green stitch in a field of pale yellow stitches, for example.

Erin had me take a cell phone photo of my skeins together and then use a monochrome filter on the photo to easily see the differences in value of the colors in the skeins. In my selections, two of the skeins were predominantly dark (low value) with some light parts and the third was markedly lighter (high value). That mix should help keep the colors visible as they match up against one another.

I can’t wait to get started on this project!

What am I Knitting?

I’m working a little on the sock from my last journal entry, and I’m also making a tiny bit of progress on my new grandbaby’s baby blanket.

The special challenge of the baby blanket, dear reader, is this: It is dark, dark, dark green. The darkness of Tolkien’s Mirkwood, Dante’s dark forest, and Ivy’s Covington Woods. (That last reference is for my firstborn, who has yet to forgive me for making him watch The Village and forever scarring him with a morbid fear of a certain type of forests. And maybe the color red. But the soundtrack is gorgeous, don’t you think? Sample below!)

What I’m saying is: The yarn is dark. I love this green, but my eyes want a lot of light to work with it. To apply our art lesson review, I’m finding it more challenging to work with the lowest values in my favorite hues as I get older.

What are you working on today?

Happy knitting!

Kiersten J

5/17/2024