Choosing a different color than the color shown in the pattern illustration can contribute to your producing knitted or crocheted items with a special touch to them. For the crafter who makes a knitted or crocheted item as a gift, a carefully thought out color choice can lend a particularly distinctive flare to the item.

Sweaters and even more so shawls give you an excellent palette to try out your color creativity in your knitted or crocheted projects.

For the most part, you can do the same kinds of color changes from the original pattern with both sweaters and shawls.

If you want to try to make some creative combinations with sweaters and shawls, first look at the pattern as a whole to assess how and where you might do so.

Is the pattern illustration shown in a solid color, whereas a variegated yarn might have more potential? Conversely, is it shown in variegated but might work well, at least for a specific recipient of a gift, in a bold, solid color? Or, can you even alternate rows in a shawl for instance, and have some of the body in variegated and some of the body in a solid color?

Does the shawl or sweater have a trim row or set of rows or some sort of edging? Edging and and trim rows, such as the button and button hole band on a sweater are a great place to experiment with a color change even if the pattern doesn’t call for such a change.

Even though working part of a garment in variegated yarns gives even more potential than solid colors, even with solid color garments you can use the same kinds of principles and introduce different colors into the garment such as by working the body in one yarn color and trim rows, such as sweater’s button and buttonhole bands or the finish rows of a shawl in a different color.

There are many different ways you can shift your yarn color choices around.

You can, for example, choose to coordinate colors. In such an instance, you would work, for example, a body row in a bright orange color and work your trim rows in a paler orange shade of peach. Or, you could work the body in peach and the edging in brighter orange. You can do the same kind of coordination with any dark-light shading in the same color. Examples include violet with lavender, navy or royal blue with pale blue, deep green with a mint shade of green and several others.

If you choose to work the body of a sweater or shawl with trim in a variegated color, you have even more choice for distinctive mix-and-match that can provide some dramatic effects. You can, in this instance go with either a coordination, a contrast, or a combination I regard as somewhere between coordination and contrast.

In a coordinating trim, you would choose one of the colors in the variegation and choose a trim yarn shade as close to any one of the colors as possible.

In a contrast trim, you would choose a color not in the variegated yarn that sets it off for an attractive effect. For example, if you choose a variegated yarn with deep color shades and no white incorporated into the pattern, you could use white or any neutral shade of yarn such as a beige or charcoal gray to set off the pattern.

The combination I regard as in between coordination and contrast would be to choose a color represented in the variegated yarn but in a reverse depth of shade from the variegated yarn. That is to say, if you have a variegated body yarn in bright, bold colors such as red, blue and green, you could choose a pastel shade of blue or green to set off the body work with a solid color trim. Conversely, if you used a pastel variegated yarn with yellows, pinks, and paler green shades for the shawl, you could choose a deep green shade such as forest green or a deep, near-yellow shade such as a gold tone yarn for your trim rows.

For a crocheted shawl with edging, you could even choose to alternate separate colors in the trim. For example, suppose you had a shawl with a blue-green-red variegation and five trim rows. You could work the first trim row in blue or green, the second in white or a neutral color, the third in red, the fourth in white, and the fifth in blue or green: whichever you didn’t use in the first row.

This particular effect works better with crocheted than knitted patterns; however, if you are skilled at both crafts and wanted to get inventive you could actually get this affect with a knitted shawl by adapting your pattern to add a crocheted edging from a separate crochet pattern. Although unusual in the past, combination patterns like this are on the rise in recent years.

You can see from that by judicious color selection, and using variegated yarn for some portion of the pattern, you could come up with an almost unlimited number of unique garments using the same pattern.

If you want to try color experiments like these, familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of the pattern before you go the craft or yarn store so that you can adjust your yarn purchase to allow you to purchase different quantities than the original pattern calls for.

For example, if a shawl pattern calls for five skeins of yarn, and you estimate that the body is four fifths of the volume of the pattern, you will want to purchase four skeins of main color and one of trim color.

As always, ensure that you do not mix fibers. If you use wool for the main color, do not combine that with an acrylic yarn for the trim. Also, if you use dye lot yarn ensure that you have enough of that dye lot for the portion of the peice that uses that color.

It can take a little practice to adjust to this kind of planning and purchasing strategy, but you are likely to find the outcome of adding this kind of color creativity to your knitted or crocheted projects well worth the effort.