The Bookmarked color palette

Soft muted shades that are squarely in my wheelhouse

The Bookmarked palette (pictured in 50g half skeins). From L to R: Cockled, Lightly Foxed, Antiquarian, Leatherbound, and Ex Libris.

Hunter, the amazing human who created the Bookmarked pattern (for tiny knitted books with secret compartments) and I both love books. We love them with abandon. She has an actual library card catalog in her house, and I like to imagine that if we lived closer, we would be friends with adjacent reading forts and stacks and stacks of books to be read, shared, and giggled over.

When Hunter approached me with the project idea for Bookmarked, I knew the colors she was thinking of were absolutely and squarely within my wheelhouse. I wanted the set to capture the beautiful dusty shades of antiquarian books—no jackets, just that musty dusty old book feeling. Know what I mean?

I didn’t even use this as a reference photo. I simply searched my favorite photo database using the terms “antiquarian books” while writing this post! Photo by Annie Spratt, Unsplash

Today, I’d like to tell you a funny story about how dyes are made and give you some insight about why these colors work so well together.

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Why a colorway dyed this year may not look the same when it’s dyed next year

Dye powders are ground from actual earth pigments (naturally occurring minerals that are colored). They are created at commercial levels (even for hand-dyers)—really substantial volumes of dye are ground together at any given time so that variations from batch to batch become blended and more consistent. Major inconsistencies or reformulations are flagged by the dye company so that small hand-dyers, like me, know when a dye might not perform as we are used to.

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, that is. Over the past several years, there have been numerous shortages of dye pigments, shut-downs of dye mixing, and just all around wonkiness. Some dye colors have been out of stock for a year or more. Last year, there was a shortage of blue pigment, and all blue dyes were in short supply.

I keep a pretty large stock of dyes on hand, so the dye shortages haven’t impacted me very much, until now. I work with primary colors, you see, which helps create my signature layered look to the yarn, and it also helps me avoid developing a great colorway but then not being able to get the dye for it. (I might order new primary dyes only once a year.)

Imagine my surprise, then, when I integrated a new 1-pound jar of blue dye into my dye stock and saw that my trusty Antiquarian formula had somehow changed from pink to caramel!

Because this colorway is so firmly in my wheelhouse, I know how to adjust my formula so that the color moves back to the intended shade, but I thought you’d find this behind-the-scenes vignette interesting!

The Antiquarian colorway I’ll be production dyeing (once I’ve re-confirmed my formula) is a soft and light dusty pink-mauve-coral that somewhat defies description. I love a good pink, and this one (on the left) has an underlayer of caramel and an overlayer of mauve. Together, they make this light-defying pink that shines brown in some light and peachy in others. (Although I do love the “new” version too!)

Why these colorways look so good together

I created three dye “blends” for this palette, and all five colorways are variations of these three blends. There’s the caramel that is the first layer of color in Antiquarian, and that same caramel comes back in much greater intensity for Leatherbound. You might not see the caramel layer in Cockled, but it’s there, and gives this particular shade of blue a beautiful warm glow.

I love the idea of connecting all the colorways with similar underlayers, so that whether you knit these colors as a tiny set of knitted books (with secret compartments!) for your bookshelf, or whether you turn them into a beautiful striped sweater, they will all harmonize and sing together.

Preorders are open until November 20

All five colorways are open for preorder from now through Sunday, November 20, on my 80/20 Smooth Sock base (fingering weight, 400 yards | 115g, 80% superwash merino, 20% nylon).

Here is the full palette, shot with my macro camera lens, which shows all the layers, shades and specks of color in each colorway:

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Ex Libris: A cool toad green

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Cockled: lavender-leaning and watery blue

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Lightly Foxed: creamy pages with the tiniest dots of bark

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Antiquarian: a soft dusty pink-mauve-coral

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Leatherbound: lavender-infused brown

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What will you make?

If you follow me on Instagram, you know I’ve been contemplating a cabled grandma style sweater made out of Lightly Foxed (held double, so that I get a lovely worsted gauge). What would you make? With which color?

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I promise I’ll continue to think kindly of you. 💙