December 11, 2025
This past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a design for a striped sweater using all six of the Fiction X DEGEN colorways.
The first week was just figuring out an order for the color-stripes that preserves the integrity of each colorway.
But the effect of a color is different when you see it alone then when placed next to other colors.
My original swatch is at left and the final swatch at right:
With the original color sequence, I tried to alternate dark and light colors while also alternating warm and cool tones.
The idea was to bring each color out strongly by placing it next to its opposite in either value or temperature; ideally both.I often found that these two goals opposed each other, which I expected, but I also struggled because alternating requires having the same number of each group being alternated. This collection however is full of warmth and relatively dark values, and very few cool or light colors. Compromises were expected but frustrating, and it ended up taking hours to feel satisfied enough to even knit the swatch.
Shown in grayscale, the dark and light striping in my original swatch shows it to be more successful in alternating values stripe-by-stripe than my final sequence on the right.
After completing the swatch, I washed and blocked it, allowed it to dry over a full day, measured it, and began the math for my sweater. It was rare for me to take so much care in preparation; I usually love the excitement of beginning without knowing the end, but I wanted to push myself to use some of the hard skills of designing that I’d learned but not practiced. It seemed sort of impossible to be badly rewarded for such patient work, so I kept trying to convince myself that the swatch was as good as it gets, and to move on to writing the pattern.
After a day or so, I was able to get enough distance from the effort I’d potentially wasted to accept that I didn’t love the result enough to make an entire sweater with these stripes.
The area I disliked most seemed to be the brown next to the burgundy. The brown didn’t feel punchy like it did standing alone, and I felt sure it was burgundy’s fault. Color is perceived as coming forward when it’s warmer, and cool colors recede. Burgundy dominated by being both warmer; and also by being darker. In a way, the thin strip of brown appeared a bit like a shadow hanging under burgundy.
Corn Pone Pine Cone (the brown colorway) is one of my favorites of the collection. I love this photo of the finished pieces by one of the test-knitters from the Maya Sweater, which shows off how warm this colorway can be. It would be difficult to capture the hue in such a thin stripe, but I thought that highlighting it’s warmth somehow could give it the punch it needed.
This led to an important realization: Corn Pone Pine Cone was a priority for me.
Juxtaposing value and temperature was important where possible, but when it comes down to it, I don’t care if some of the other colors look a little less prominent, but I want Corn Pone Pine Cone to look good in this sweater. There’s no particular reason for this particular goal, but I’ve learned to follow the goals that seem curiously reason-less, so I started over and re-ordered the stripes:
In the new color-sequence, I sandwiched brown Corn Pone Pine Cone between two cool-ish tones–an acidy yellow (Scobi Diver) and blue (Kelp Futon).
Even though yellow is warm overall, the greenishness made it cooler and it’s a lot lighter than Corn Pone, so that gave Corn Pone dominance in terms of value.
Next time, I must be wary not only of my chosen rules, but my secret rules of color
Looking back, I think there was a secret rule in play, blocking my ability to find the best sequence. It’s a rule that’s so obvious that I didn’t even question following it. That rule is “don’t put same hues next to each other.” I had tried so hard to keep the yellow from the brown because the brown has yellow spots. I also kept the green from being next to the yellow because of the yellow’s green spots. The new order demanded placing all three in a row, allowing the yarns to be slightly less distinct where these same hues mingled.
But now I love having these three together because it creates a feeling of a spectrum, continuing from color to color. This spectrum motif appears in stripe sequencing above it as well, where red and burgundy appear.
Color theory has some limitations.
I’ve never had a strong adherence to rules in art, so working with color theory doesn’t feel restrictive, rather it feels like a game that creates challenges which push me into palettes that surprise me–an experience I love very much. With that said, if there is one rule I’d recommend to anyone working on a color project of any kind, it would be to listen to the thing you want for no reason, and make that the priority above all other rules.
I’ll be sharing more from my process with this sweater as I go!
