Selecting Fair Isle Yarn

Question from the comment section:

How do you select yarn from Knit Picks Palette to substitute in a fair isle pattern?

Well, I just looked at the yarns and used my natural artistic talents. Actually, not. In reality it took me three days of obsessing until I gave up and decided that I would order the yarn, swatch it and at $1.79 per skein if I need to change some colors so be it. I was also beginning to feel like a bad mommy because color combinations was all I thought about.

First I took some graph paper and colored in the pattern to try to get an idea of how the colors interacted with the pattern. Then I looked on the Internet for pictures of other peoples Donegal sweaters. Not a single picture used the same colors as the pattern book. It was rather interesting to look at what people had selected. I chose which color variations I like best and tried to see if I could come up with a similar combination out of the Palette yarns. Although the Donegal pattern calls for 11 colors I ended up altering the pattern to use only 10 since I couldn't find 11 that worked well for me.

As for the Palette line from Knitpicks, I am grateful for it since it seems like the only fair isle yarn out there comes from England. On the other hand, there are only 30 colors to chose from which seems like a lot but is not compared to the 161 colors from Jamieson & Smith. The Palette colors seem quite bright also. I don't know why they don't make colors in the darker range such as Burgundy and forest green. I figure that I will give it a go. Check back after Christmas when I knit up a swatch to find out whether this is a failed experiment.