A Colorful Dilemma

I love handpainted yarns. I love lace yarns. I do not love handpainted lace yarns. In the skein, they are glorious. When knitted into lace, they often look, well, is ghastly too strong a word?

Now that the Icelandic shawl is finished (pix soon), I have been casting about for the next project. Of course, I had to scrutinize the current lace yarn offerings and I am sorry to report that virtually all the handpainted lace yarn I viewed this week is quite unsuitable for lace.

Let's take this exquisite shawl by Janice Kang as an example. Here it is knitted in dark hunter green.




And here it is knitted in a famous handpaint.

You can see a closeup picture of this stole on Janice's lovely blog. Unfortunately, it looks even worse in detail. The breathtaking effect of the pattern is totally annihilated by the wildly variegated yarn.

Here's another example of what doesn't work:


I acquired this design somewhere and couldn't discern the actual lace pattern until I Photoshopped the picture so the shawl was shaded as plain old black. It's very pretty, but you wouldn't know it from this picture.


Note: Both these patterns are available here.

For the past several years, handpainters have showered knitters with a colorful riot of sock yarns. But what works for socks does not work for lace. A cornucopia of rich color rarely looks bad in a sock. In a shawl, though, the results can be, um, confusing.

Lace can look lovely in a subtly variegated yarn. It also can look pretty with commercially printed yarns. For example, both my Swallowtail and my Icelandic shawls were knitted with the latter type of variegated yarns purchased in Japan. Yarn Place's Graceful and JoJoLand's Harmony lace yarns are two examples available in the U.S.. I've seen both knitted into lace, and the results are stunning. The long, gradual color blends produce quite a different effect from the short, abrupt flip-flops often seen with handpaints.

I have a drawer full of handpainted lace yarn destined for the black or dark blue dye pot. I learned my lesson and won't purchase any more of the wildly assorted color mixes, no matter how seductive they look in the skein.

If you are a handpaint artist and want to sell me lace yarn, you might want to tone down the palette. A lot. Store owners: I would be so grateful of you would seek out lace yarns that provide a bit of scintillation for the knitter without interfering with the actual pattern. You'll earn my heartfelt thanks, and I doubt I am the only lace knitter out there with a similar opinion.