Colour Pool for Knitters

Monday 17th September 2018

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We are very excited about the launch of our new yarn Colour Pool.  When you crochet with this yarn a kind of magic happens.  Once you get your stitch count right an Argyll pattern appears as if from nowhere.  It’s very exciting.

But Colour Pool also works for knitters so we thought we would show you how to get some really interesting effects.

Like so many things, it’s all in the preparation. First of all you have to find out how the yarn is going to work for your own personal tension.  We recommend using 4.5mm or 5mm needles and casting on around 30 stitches to do a sample square.

This is really easy, because you are going to work only in garter stitch, but there is counting involved.  In each ball of Colour Pool there are four distinct colours.  To check your tension you need to knit through at least four full repeats of the colour change, counting how many stitches you make in each colour.

We used April Showers and noted down the number of stitches four times.

Pale blue         17, 17, 16, 17

Blue                 22, 23, 23, 23

Turquoise        14, 14, 15 14

Lime                17, 17, 17, 17

You need to take an average for each colour and round it up if necessary

Pale Blue         17

Blue                 23

Turquoise        14

Lime                17

Now you are ready to use a really handy website called Planned Pooling which is going to do all the hard work for you.

 

The first job is to set up all your colours and enter the figures you calculated.

Now you need to input the number of stitches you want to knit.  The more stitches you put in the better the pattern will display, and the website lets you increase or decrease the number of stitches by 1 or 5 until you find the right pattern.

Here is the pattern that we get with 65 stitches.

Here we have 68 stitches – you can see a pattern starting to appear.

And here is 70 stitches – this looks like it’s going to be a good stitch count for our tension.

But look what happens at 71 stitches – isn’t that interesting?

Once you are happy with your pattern you can begin to knit but do make sure that the first colour in the sequence you begin with corresponds to the first colour on the bottom right of the chart to get the best results.

We’d love to see how you get on with Colour Pool so don’t forget to show us on our Facebook page or by tagging an image with #stylecraftcolourpool on Twitter and Instagram.

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