In 2022, I started seeing videos pop up everywhere about personal colour analysis — or PCA. It’s sure made a big comeback! I’m one of those people that love all colours. So when I started thinking about this PCA thing and what colours actually suit me best, I was totally confused. I love long walks in shady forests so I’ve always had a huge soft spot for green — from olive greens to pine greens. When I was a kid, I didn’t like cartoons but I loved Tweety so I’ve had a soft spot for yellow. And I’ve always had no colour boundaries in my wardrobe and clothes. I just love colour. Which seemed to keep me unbiased toward what my personal colour palette would be. I could not tell whether I was in the spring, summer, autumn, or winter groupings and I had no preferences. I would wear blue but would tend to steer away from it thinking that it made me look too blue and cool. After seeing these videos popping up everywhere, I stayed super curious for a year without taking the plunge of finding out by a trained expert.

I’ve been working on a book and I had the yarn bought, the colour palette set, and all the designs in progress (and more than half of them finished) when I started having the urge of adding four more designs & yarns — but the colours weren’t in the palette that I had settled on for the book. And despite them being out of palette, I started trying to force them to work by adding more colours. I took a critical step back and quickly realised that I had unleashed some colour chaos into my big project that is supposed to be a cohesive work of art. There is a personal colour analysis in Ireland (Sarah Ryan), who at some point I heard her talk about how people who run their own business can refine their brand by knowing their personal colour palette, especially if they appear in photos for their business. So it clicked. I needed help in taming the colour chaos that I got myself into.

So in May 2023, I made the decision to get help and get an online personal colour analysis done by Colour Analysis Studio. It turns out that the original colour palette for my book is overall mostly in my personal colour palette — Winter Cool! Those designs and colours that I had started shamelessly adding, I took out, shelved, and refocused. It was such an incredible relief and a great kick in the pants to cleanse some of my designs and knitting! Huge, huge, huge knitting relief. There were some designs not in my book that I had already started that were not in palette — like Gaskiers-Point La Haye, Jack Ladder, Coachman’s Cove — that I kept on with and couldn’t restart. But everything else from that point on was going to be in palette. All that said, there is some yellow, brown and peach in Book 1 that is not in my palette and that’s totally okay, but overall the collection of 17 patterns is cohesive and perfect. It’s the way it was before the colour analysis but with peace of mind this time. Peace of mind with the added benefit of no longer buying clothes and yarn in colours that I don’t end up wearing anymore! And I’ve gained a new obsession — sapphire and bright navy toned blues.

Speaking of Book 1. A sneak peak of the final 3 designs:

One of them is finished, one of them is nearly finished, and one of them is a little ways yet from being finished :) If you follow my newsletter, I wrote about Book 1 several months back and about my plans for releasing it. I’ll do another post soon about it here.

In the meantime, the next 3 things are coming in February, March, and April. And they’re in palette! Well mostly — that one with the dusty-ish pink is a bit too dusky for me, but it’s beautiful!!!