Hat Sample Finished, Color Personalities
I just finished knitting a sample Guitar Herringbone Hat for my friends at Heritage Spinning. The yarn was Heirloom Cashmino 8ply (that’s right, CashMINO, not CashMERINO). Heirloom yarns are from Australia and I’ve not seen them in Lansing-area shops, but I really like them. One of my favorites is Easy-Care 8ply, a washable springy cabled wool DK, more like old-fashioned wooly yarns than most washable wools.
This Cashmino yarn is a DK weight (the same as my Cushy Colorsport and Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino). It’s spun into a nice little springy tube, very shiny. The fiber content is 10% Cashmere, 55% Ultrafine Merino, 35% Microfibre (doesn’t say which kind). Because of the tube construction and the fiber content, the yarn actually nearly shines. It’s very nice stuff.
Joan and Deb at Heritage both like (and look great wearing) colors I don’t wear. Joan picked the yarns for my Heritage Heirloom sock, which are earthtones (harvest gold, avocado, red and brown).
Deb picked the colors for the hat I just finished. Though Deb and I agree on a few colors including hot yellow-green and teals/turquoises, we diverge from that center point for other favorite colors. For example, I picked berry and black for my Barberpole sock. When she knit my pattern, she knit two pair in Cascade Fixation… both with a variegated purple/turquoise/white background, one with hot yellow-green and one with cobalt blue.
So yesterday and today I found myself knitting a hat in lilac, periwinkle and gold (Deb’s picks)… loving how the yarn felt but not too happy with the colors. I must admit, though, now that it is all together I can see why she thought it would work. All three colors are subtle and muted, and it will look good on someone with very different coloring than my own.
(For the record, I do admit I wear combinations others would not be caught dead near… magenta and hot yellow-green, for an example. I like colors that are bright and hot and contain no gray at all, and prefer cool undertones to warm. In my personal color vocabulary, beige and brown don’t really exist, though I’ll knit a few varieties of neutral for other folks on special occasions. Almost anything in my closet looks good next to anything else in my closet; people comment all the time that I look coordinated, but it’s just that I tend to only buy the same colors so everything I own goes together.)
Some people would not have so much trouble knitting in colors they didn’t wear. I am so affected by color, I found myself racing to finish the hat. I guess that’s not all bad!
I did one day of proving I was a good sport, which surely did not hurt me at all. Interestingly, I have two other hats on the needles… one in charcoal for Brian and another Guitar Hat in brown/black/beige to simulate woodtones. Ack! Where’s my pink/purple sock??? LOL!
Photos: 1) New Guitar Herringbone Hat sample for Heritage Spinning. 2) Two Barberpole socks knit by Deb Harowitz/Scarlet Zebra, my friend who works at Heritage Spinning. 3) Same sock pattern (my design) knit by me. 4) Heritage Heirloom Sock in yarns chosen by Joan at Heritage. It’s so interesting how colors really do identify us in some ways! Interesting… when I look at this entry, you could imagine I chose the hat colors… but the lilac is subtly too pale and muted, the periwinkle I do like but it looks bad on me (too much gray in it I think) yet the giveaway is the gold… I just can’t do gold!