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Since Shetland Wool Week released the 2026 hat pattern on 22nd April, we’ve had colourwork knitting on the brain here at Baa. So I wanted to take the opportunity to chat about one of the biggest questions you might have before embarking on a colourwork knitting project… how on earth do you choose your yarn colours?! Whether you’re knitting traditional Fair Isle patterns, modern stranded colourwork – or indeed, this year’s Shetland Wool Week hat, choosing colours can sometimes feel harder than the knitting itself.
The SWW Hat pattern is always a spectacular colourwork knit. Each spring, Shetland Wool Week announces their new patron, and the official SWW hat is unveiled – a very exciting moment, with many knitters anticipating the new knit design. Whether they’re making the trip to Shetland Wool Week or not, it’s a tradition for many knitters to cast on the new design, and the same goes for our Stonehaven knitters, too.
The SWW 2026 hat is the Birsie Beanny, exclusively designed by Helen Robertson. It’s a slouchy beanie style hat with ‘Shetland Wool Week’ stitched in the colourwork on the rim. It’s quite a different colourwork hat design from the usual SWW knitting patterns, and it’s been getting some mixed reactions from customers in our Stonehaven knitting shop!
We at Baa think the hat is fantastic if you’re attending Shetland Wool Week, but since a lot of our customers tend to knit the hat to wear day to day or give as a gift, we’ve already had folks opting to remove the lettering completely, choosing to replace it with a simple ribbed band or swapping in their own colourwork motifs. I suppose that’s the beauty of knitting, right? You can mod a knitting pattern and make it your own.
But how about you? Are you a Birsie Beanny fan?
Whether you’re into this particular colourwork project or not, the question remains. When starting a new colourwork knit, how do you choose your yarn colours? I thought I’d share a few top tips from the Baa team to help you out.
A colour wheel is a brilliant starting point if you find yourself staring at a wall of yarn, not really sure where to begin. It takes the guesswork out of combining colours by showing you relationships between hues. In short, complementary colours (the ones opposite each other on the wheel) give you bold, high-contrast combinations, while analogous colours (ones sitting next to each other) create something that’s a bit softer. If you’re feeling on the adventurous side of knitting life, triadic combinations (three colours evenly spaced around the wheel) can give you something a bit more unexpected, with colours that really pop.
Janice has just got some in, so there are a few colour wheels available both in store and online. If you’re a regular colourwork knitter, or just someone who likes experimenting with colour in their wardrobe, home decor or just in general, I’d say they’re a pretty useful thing to have in your craft tool kit.
If you want a bit more of an idea of how to use the colour wheel to help you choose your colours, Janice was having a browse on Instagram and found a reel by Lisa Shroyer that shows it being used. Definitely one for your saved folder.
Janice has also just bought in several of The Box of Swatches, which we think is such a cool tool for to help you plan your colour choices for any colourwork knitting project.
Inside the box you’ll find 72 colour swatches plus a poster and some handy info on colour theory to help spark some inspo for your knits and get you thinking about your colour choices. It’s especially useful for a knitting pattern like the Birsie Beanny, or any other Shetland Wool Week hat, which has quite a lot going on colourwise. I love that you can physically play around with the swatches, swapping them in and out and rearranging the colours so you can really get an idea of how your potential yarn colours might look all together before you’ve committed to buying a ball or six.
Have you tried the saturation test yet? It’s one of my favourite tips for knitters browsing yarn in person, and super easy to do because all you need is your phone.
Once you’ve narrowed down a few colour combinations, whether that’s in your local yarn shop or raiding your yarn stash at home, take a photo of your yarn choices and then drop the saturation all the way down to 0, making your image black and white.
Now look at how all the colours look as shades of grey. Do they look distinctly different from one another, or do they all blur into a similar tone? For stranded colourwork knitting, you generally want a mix of light, mid and dark tones; otherwise, all those intricate motifs you worked hard to knit up can end up getting a bit lost in the fabric, which is a tragedy.
This is especially worth thinking about for colours that sit next to one another in the pattern. If your colourwork knit uses 6, 7, 8, 9+ colours in it, not everything needs to look completely different, but by checking the contrast between yarn pairings, you can get a better sense of what colours will work well next to each other and which combinations you might want to avoid.
Obviously, you might wanna knit something with low contrast colourwork, and that’s absolutely fine, you do you. The whole point of doing the saturation test is that it lets you go into your colourwork knitting project with your eyes open.
It can also help to do this with your actual knitted swatches too so you can experiment with colour placement and see what works before you commit to the full cast on.
Some of the best colourwork palettes can come from the most unexpected of places. Like the patch of wildflowers growing in your local park or the view from the top of the hill you just spent two hours climbing or your fave painting or a photo you took on your phone. Hell, there are people who make blankets using Taylor Swift album covers or something, right??
This is actually how we chose the colours for our own SWW hat knitting kits. Regulars of our knitting shop will know by now that each year we like to release two collections of knitting kits using our favourite yarn, Jamieson’s of Shetland Spindrift. The first selection of kits are designed to complement the colourways of the original Shetland Wool Week hat and the second collection, our ‘Baa Collection’ of knitting kits are inspired by images from Scottish photographer Jenny Anderson.
A lot of these images have been of Scottish landscapes like this one, but last year, we based the collection on a series of photographs from Jenny’s travels around the world and they looked fantastic.
So, if you’re ever stuck choosing your colours for colourwork knitting, try going for a walk. Pick out some colours from something that catches your eye and see if you can match them to your yarn of choice. You never know when or where inspiration might strike and what colour combinations that might bring up.
Might be a bit of an obvious one, but none of this colour planning matters much if your yarn doesn’t come in enough shades to give you real choice, now does it? Good job we stock all 200+ shades of Jamieson’s of Shetland Spindrift here in our little Stonehaven knitting shop, then.
If you’re planning on knitting the Birsie Beanny or any other 4-ply colourwork knit, I think you’ll agree, it gives you rather a lot of colour possibilities to play with. And if you need help narrowing things down, whether you’re shopping with us in person, or even online, we’re always on hand to help with colour selection. Janice is a proper pro when it comes to Spindrift, having somehow committed every single colour name to memory… such an impressive brain she has!
So there we have it – our top tips for choosing your yarn colours for colourwork knitting. If you fancy casting on the Birsie Beanny, the pattern can be downloaded or bought in printed format via the Shetland Wool Week website. If you’re local to our Stonehaven knitting shop, you’re also welcome to pop in and pick up a printed copy in person.
And as always, we’ll be creating our own versions of the colourways in knitting kits using Jamieson of Shetland Spindrift so keep an eye out online and in the shop for those!
Do you have any stellar advice when it comes to colourwork knitting? Is there a top tip we missed from our list? If so, we’d love to know. Get in touch or send us a message on Instagram, we always love hearing from you.
