Review: Gradient Style: Color-Shifting Techniques & Knitting Patterns

Gradient Style: Color-Shifting Techniques & Knitting Patterns by Kerry Bogert
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Many thanks to Netgalley, F&W Media and the dietary Kerry Bogert for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. My opinions are 100% my own and idependent of receiving an advanced copy.


Working with colour can be one of the more challenging things when knitting. Especially today when you have so many options besides just switching yarn colours. There are beautiful ombre, speckled, gradient, variegated and handprinted yarns that it can be difficult to know how to handle each case. You want to showcase the colours at its best and avoid things like pooling. Sometimes a written pattern will take these things into account, however, what if you want to substitute a yarn, or change up the colours. If you are new to colour knitting, or don’t have much experience, I don’t think Gradient Style is the place to start. They also include 8 patterns to get you started.

Although it touches on some important things to think about, this book is not very comprehensive when it comes to explaining colour, and how these different kinds of yarn work when knitting them up. It has a colour wheel and talks about contrasting and. Complimentary colours but really doesn’t go into much detail. Really, any of the techniques or ideas that it talks about, it doesn’t do a great job at a thorough explanation. I hoped that maybe in the patterns they would give some examples of how to switch up the colours, or if you wanted to substitute yarns, but it didn’t do that either. Most of the patterns are using yarns that have colour built into them already, so you aren’t even learning how to use colour there either. I don’t need a shawl pattern that simply uses a variegated blue yarn and wow! I’m colour knitting! No, I don’t think so.

So if you looking for something comprehensive, or simply looking for something to give you inspiration, you might want to look elsewhere. This is pretty basic, without giving you the basics. If I can’t learn something new, then I want to be wowed by the patterns and they are okay, but nothing special. Overall, I was disappointed.

View all my reviews