The Colour in the Picture: How Much Does It Influence?

Do you remember I told you the story about “Nobody likes Green”?  It’s a running joke in my knit group: one day, one of the members went into a LYS to buy some green yarn to finish a project she was working on.  She couldn’t find any green at all and asked the owner where it was, and the reply came back, “We don’t carry green because nobody likes green.”  And my friend left and went to another LYS where her colour preferences made her a bit more of a somebody.

Now, every time I dye green, I can’t help but chuckle.  Nobody likes green.

On Wednesday, Lisa Shroyer, the editor of Knitscene magazine, tweeted this:

And the link leads to the Ravelry page showing Knitscene’s patterns sorted by popularity.  Sure enough, the top five are green.  When I put “Knitty” into the search box, I couldn’t narrow it down to just patterns from Knitty magazine but, interestingly enough, the first four patterns that did come up were green too.  In fact, most of the top 10 were green and, as you scroll down, green is the dominant colour across the whole page.

Clearly, somebody likes green!

So this got me thinking, how much are we influenced by the colour of the sample on a pattern?  How good are we at actually looking a pattern that is shown in one colour and imagining it done in another colour?  It seems easy enough — we’re all smart enough to look at a picture of a blue jumper and imagine it in yellow — but does the colour in the picture still influence whether we decide to make the pattern or not?

And, is the best default colour green?  Is green the new black?  Are you a somebody, or a nobody?

from left to right: Celeste in City Park, Estelle in Lost, Stella in City Park

So here’s what I want you to do:  Go to Ravelry and have a look through your favourites and your queue.  Is there a dominant colour?  And when you made the items in your finished objects, how far did you stray from the colours in the pattern picture?

Then come back here and tell me.  I really want to know!  Can you see a theme, a link between the colours you use and the colours in the pictures of the patterns you choose?  Are you choosing patterns because of the colour in the picture?

Oh, and while you’re at it…  How do you feel about green?