Choosing yarn colour combinations for your knitting or crochet

Choosing yarn colour combinations for your knitting or crochet poses one of the most challenging decisions. When faced with a multitude of yarn colours, it's common to feel overwhelmed.

Yet, colour holds significant personal importance and has a profound influence on our daily lives. A radiant blue sky can elevate our spirits, giving us a sense of tranquility and contentment. Conversely, a dreary grey sky may sometimes dampen our mood, leaving us feeling disheartened and subdued.

But fret not if you're grappling with selecting the right yarn colour combination for your project. I've outlined my top tips for choosing your next yarn colour combinations, streamlining the process of finding the perfect hues. With your next project, you'll experience joy and happiness as you knit or crochet.

Knitted socks with teal and orange stripes on a short circular knitting needle, with a skein of orange yarn in the background. Top tips for choosing yarn colour combinations.

How Colours Affect Your Wellbeing

We can turn the impact of colour to our advantage, with our knitting and crochet.

Using your favourite colours in your knitting and crochet projects will help lift your mood. When your mood is negative, and you’re feeling down in the dumps, you’re more likely to turn to darker colours. This will dull your spark even more.

But if you have projects ready and waiting in your favourite happy colours, this will help improve the way you are feeling. As you knit and crochet, you will enjoy your beautiful shades of yarn, and you will feel lighter and brighter with every stitch.

Showing crochet mandalas that can help you choose yarn colour combinations

Choosing yarn colour combinations

Most of us have a favourite colour or colour palette without even knowing it. This means that we can often end up choosing the same colours or shades for our knitting and crochet projects.

Recently, I’ve been drawn to Orange and Teal, and they make a fabulous combination that makes me feel so happy and relaxed when I’m knitting with them.

Knitting in stripes to help you choose yarn colour combinations

Orange and Teal fall opposite each other on the colour wheel. Orange is classed as a ‘warm’ colour and Teal is classed as a ‘cool’ colour (part of the Blue spectrum). Therefore, they make the perfect contrast and they complement each other beautifully.

If you're struggling to decide on a colour combination for your knitting or crochet, you can use a colour wheel. This will help you decide which colours make you feel happy, relaxed, positive and calm. You can turn to your happy project when you’re feeling under the weather, stressed, annoyed or just fed-up.
You can take a look in your wardrobe and see what colours are in your favourite items of clothing or favourite accessory. There is probably a clue, whether it’s in the finer detail of the printed pattern, or in that little pop of colour that caught your eye when you bought it.
You can make small yarn pegs by wrapping yarn around wooden pegs, or sticks. Then, you can place these next to each other to find pleasing colour combinations.

You can wrap short lengths of yarn around cardboard tubes or tags. Then you can play around with colour combinations by creating stripes.
You can knit short strips of yarn, changing colour to see which combinations make you happy.

Basic Colour Wheel Theory for Knitters

To help you get started with choosing your favourite colours, I've added a quick guide to using a colour wheel. Use it to help plan the colours for your next project. Here are a few suggestions on how to apply the colour wheel theory:

For a bight, bold feel, you can use primary and secondary colours.

To create a beautiful fade, you can choose difference tones of the same colours, and start with the lighter tones and gradually fade into darker tones. You can achieve a similar effect with analogous colours too.

For stripes, you can try complementary colours.

I hope I've given you some ideas on how to choose your yarn colour combinations to help you find your happy colours and to use your knitting or crochet as a wellbeing tool. You can knit stripes in small swatches to try out colour combinations.