Sweater Season: A warren of Warrens

One of the most fun—and the trickiest—parts of colorwork is picking colors. There are so many choices! High contrast, low contrast, analogous colors, complements... the choices are seemingly endless. 

So, where do you start? I tell my students to think about what drew you to the design originally: what about the color combination do you respond to? What creates its main visual impact? For the projects in our Deep Winter 2021 collection, and for my Warren sweater in particular, the real visual driver is contrast: virtually all of the patterns involve pairing a darker, more deeply saturated shade against Fawn, our oatmeal-colored neutral, and Warren, which pairs Fawn and Midnight, is no exception. So when I started thinking about alternate colorways for Warren, that's where I started. After a lot of swatching and a lot of squinting at remnants of Forge held next to each other, here are a few of my favorite alternate pairings:

Fawn Goes With Everything

We love Fawn as a neutral, and used it as a backdrop for pretty much everything in this collection. It works as a CC for Warren with pretty much everything in our color range except for Dusk and Mustard (both of which are too close for comfort). Lake and Juniper are light enough that you'd lose some of the visual impact of the more deeply saturated shades, but pretty much anything else works. Here, I've shown it with Red Feather, a combination I think would work great with denim as an everyday sweater.

Flip It

I designed Warren with the darker color as the main body of the sweater, with the lighter color as trim, with the effect that the colorwork looks like dark lines written on a lighter background. If we flip the MC and CC so that the lighter color is on top, we get a quite different feel, with something that looks like bricks or blocks stacked together. Here I've shown it with Raven and Fawn, but this kind of combination could work equally well with Ash as the main color. 

Non-Neutral Contrast Colors

While Warren, like most of our Deep Winter 2021 pieces, uses Fawn as its backdrop, I also love the motif against a more colorful background. My husband picked this wonderful combination of Dusk and Midnight, but I also love the idea of a tone-on-tone combination of Lake and Midnight, or a bolder, brighter version with Gold Leaf as the CC.