a sweater of many shades

I really enjoyed thinking about multiple-shade palettes for our Colour Compass advent calendar, which we’ve recently made available again for those who missed out last year. The accompanying e-book (which is also available separately from the yarn) has several sections that are specifically designed to help knitters explore a range of methods of putting colours together, while the six patterns in the collection were all developed to help the knitter make the most of small amounts of the advent calendar’s many shades.

I created Endways, one of the patterns in that collection, as an easy-to-wear blank canvas to encourage individual palette exploration, and it has been really interesting for me to see the many different colourful directions that knitters have taken with this design over the past few months. Some, like Maylin, have whipped up fabulous colour-blocked versions with big, deep stripes, while others, such as Janet, have knitted beautifully restrained two-tone sweaters. Our colleague, Kate C, has recently finished her own Endways, and it is such a lovely and interesting example of what might be done with a relatively complex multi-shade palette that I wanted to show it to you.

Kate C’s Endways uses thirteen different shades, arranged in a gradient over a single neutral background. So, her sweater includes fourteen shades in total.

Kate C chose Milarrochy Tweed‘s silvery Birkin shade as her background neutral and against this, arranged the following shades in a blue-brown-grey-green gradient: Smirr, Eyebright, Outsea, Ardlui, Tarbet, Lochan, Horseback Brown, Hare, Ardnamurchan, Garth, Gaskin, Stockiemuir, Chingly.

There’s a distinctive balance and progression through Kate C’s shade arrangement. I love how she has placed the deeper and paler blues so that they gradually fade away to become part of the greyed-out background . . .

. . . and particularly like how Lochan and Horseback Brown get to enjoy, in Kate C’s palette, their own place in the sun as the darkest, highest-contrast shades. 

There are pleasures of juxtaposition here as well: Gaskin waving hello to Stockiemuir; Ardlui meeting Outsea as two very different kinds of blue;

Fourteen distinct shades sounds like an awful lot, but when brought together like this against a harmonising neutral they suddenly all start to sing together. Kate C’s method – of alternating a grounding neutral with narrow stripes of different colours – is a brilliant way of developing a multi-shade palette, whether in gradient or high contrast arrangements.

So if you’ve got a bunch of single skeins of advent yarn, left over from a calendar, you might consider creating a similar palette to Kate C’s. As a basic, wearable sweater that works for many body shapes, Endways is a great blank canvas for colour exploration, and will work with any fingering weight or 4 ply yarn you have to hand, not just Milarrochy Tweed. Knitted in the pattern’s first size, Kate C’s Endways used just seven 25g skeins of Birkin and less than a single skein of each of her contrast shades.

Thanks, Kate C! Having enjoyed his recent forays into knitwear modelling, photobombing BOB now wants an Endways too.