Making Color Sense of the Inara Wrap

by Kimber Baldwin June 16, 2023

The Inara Wrap, designed by Ambah O'Brien, is a wonderful template for playing with lots of colors. The design formula itself is elegant and straightforward with a simple lace panel knit with one (main) color broken up with a bit of garter stitch rows in a contrasting color. Once you reach the midpoint of the wrap, you switch which colors you use for the main (lace) color and which you use for the garter contrast, and work through the color pairings again. (Note that the pattern states to work backwards through the color pairings but to maintain the rainbow or chromatographic color order, you work through the color in the same sequence as the first half of the wrap. Like many things, it is actually much easier to knit it in practice than it is to describe.

When selecting colors for this project, it's best to select high-contrast colors so that the garter rows 'pop'. There are many ways to do this, but one of my favorites is to select colors across from each other on the color wheel, known as complementary colors. Below is a 'color wheel' created from the swatches of each of the colors in the 'Over the Rainbow' infinity fade set.

Picture shows 14 knitted swatches arranged in a circle by color, creating a rainbow color wheel.

There are 14 color swatches in the color wheel. If each color is paired with the one across from it, we create 7 complementary color pairings. The pattern lends itself to addition of more colors, increasing the length by 2 sections with each additional color pairing. Because of the yardage requirements for the Inara Shawl, you will need a Some Like it Hot and Play it Cool six packs (one of each) and the Over the Rainbow Matchmaker Set.

Just a little side note that, because of the multiple items needed for this project, we have assembled yarn packs for each of the three infinity fade colorways that we currently carry and I have also given the links again near the end of this blog post.

Over the Rainbow Inara Wrap yarn pack

Sundance Inara Wrap yarn pack

Fractal Inara Wrap yarn pack

If you take out all the mini skeins from the sets above and arrange them in a color wheel arrangement, you would have something similar to the following:

Again, it's worth mentioning that each color will form a color pair with the color directly across from it. If we rearrange the colors above into complementary color pairings, we can better visualize how they will be used in the shawl. Note that I wound up all the minis for the following photo:

Looking at the color pairings above, it's apparent that there is high contrast between each of the seven pairs of complementary colors. The pattern is written for 6 color pairings or twelve sections, but it is easily extended to include 7 color pairings (14 sections). Each of the pairs is assigned a number, 1 through 7 and each of the colors in that pairing is assigned either 'A' or 'B'. Note that the 'A' and 'B' assignments are not arbitrary; the 'A' colors are all from one half of the color wheel and the 'B' colors from the other half.

Which color pair you begin and end with is arbitrary. For my Inara Wrap, I decided to begin with B1 as the main color and A1 as the contrast color for the first section. The second section would contain B2 as the main color and A2 as the contrast color. After knitting the first two sections, it looked like this:

I continued in the same fashion, keeping color 'B' as the main color and 'A' as the accent color and progressing through pairs 1 through 7, which brought the project to the midway point of the wrap.

After knitting 7 sections, the midpoint is reached. For the second half of the wrap, the colors used for the main color and the contrast color are reversed; color 'A' is now the main color and color 'B' is the contrast color and the color pairings are worked again in the same order, using A1 for the main color and B1 for the contrast color of section 8, A2 for the main color and B2 for the contrast color of section 9, and continuing on in the same fashion through section 14.

This color pairing technique works for any of our infinity fade colorway sets. The following pictures show how to lay out the various skeins in a color wheel.