How to Choose Colours for Your Crochet Blanket

Choosing colours for a crochet blanket is one of those decisions that seems like it should be easy – and occasionally is – but can also have you staring at your screen at eleven o’clock at night, second-guessing a combination you’d already settled on. Even after years of designing colourwork blankets, I still find it one of the more genuinely absorbing parts of the process.

There’s no single right method. What I’ve landed on is a loose set of principles that help me feel confident in a palette before I commit to it – and a few hard-won lessons about what can go wrong even when the colours look right at first glance. I’ll share those here, along with some approaches that other makers find useful.

If you’re looking for inspiration from other designers’ colour processes, I’ve also written a post exploring how twelve crochet designers approach choosing palettes for their blankets – well worth a read if you’d like a wider range of perspectives.

Start with what you actually like

This sounds obvious, but it’s easy to talk yourself out of it. The more time I’ve spent designing, the more I’ve come back to a simple starting point: begin with colours you genuinely like making and living with.

For a blanket I’m making for my own home, I think about the room it’ll live in — the furniture, the light at different times of year, what’s already there. Colours that work well on screen don’t always feel right draped over a sofa. And conversely, a combination I’d never have chosen in theory can feel exactly right once it’s actually in the space.

For gift blankets, especially baby gifts, I try to think about the recipient’s home and taste rather than my own. A palette I love might be entirely wrong for someone else’s aesthetic, even if it’s technically beautiful.

Look beyond yarn for your inspiration

Some of my favourite colour combinations have come from completely outside the crochet world. Textiles, ceramics, interiors magazines, art prints – all of it is fair game. If I see a glazed ceramic bowl in a muted sage and warm terracotta that stops me in my tracks, I’ll save the image and come back to it when I’m thinking about colour.

Instagram and Pinterest are genuinely useful here – not for crochet specifically, but for the broader visual world. I save images with colour combinations I’m drawn to, and they’re often much more useful than browsing yarn shop pages directly.

Test your colours in physical form where you can

One of the most helpful things I did when I was starting out was investing in a set of yarn pegs. These are small sample pegs of yarn for specific yarn ranges, that let you see the actual colour before you buy full balls. This matters more than you might think – online product photos can be quite far from the real colour, depending on how the image was shot, and screen colour rendering varies between devices too.

With yarn pegs, you can hold different colours next to each other, move them around, and get a much more accurate sense of how they’ll look together in real life. If you’ve found a yarn range you love and use regularly, a set of pegs for that range is a genuinely worthwhile investment.

If yarn pegs aren’t an option, a reasonably accurate alternative is to take screenshots of the yarn on the product page and arrange them side by side on your screen, or drop them into a simple image editor. It’s less reliable than handling physical samples, but it’s better than going solely on memory.

It’s also worth building up your own collection of samples over time. When you finish a project, save a little of the leftover yarn – wrap it around a small piece of card or a peg, label it with the yarn name and colour, and keep it somewhere accessible. Before long you’ll have a useful personal reference library that you can draw on when planning future projects: something you can physically hold, move around, and compare without needing to order anything new.

Bear in mind that proportions change everything

Here’s the thing that catches people out: when you’re looking at colours on pegs, or arranging swatches, or putting screenshots next to each other, you’re usually seeing roughly equal amounts of each colour. That’s rarely how they’ll appear in the finished blanket.

In most patterned or colourwork designs, colours occupy very different proportions of the finished piece. One is typically the background – covering most of the surface – and the others appear as motifs, accents, or borders. A combination that looks balanced and harmonious in equal amounts can feel entirely different when one colour dominates.

Before you commit, it’s worth thinking through which colour will be the background and which will form the design, and then trying to visualise what a large expanse of your background colour will look like, with the accent colour used more sparingly on top of it. The same two colours can produce a blanket that feels very different depending on which is which.

A really practical way to explore this before you pick up your hook is to sketch it out with colouring pencils or felt-tip pens. Even a rough approximation of the pattern, coloured in, will tell you far more about proportions and colour relationships than staring at yarn on pegs. My Superstars Blanket pattern actually comes with an accompanying colouring sheet for exactly this reason – so you can plan your colour placement before you start crocheting. But it would be straightforward to create your own: a simple grid or outline sketch of the design is all you need.

Contrast matters, especially in tapestry crochet

For any colourwork design – tapestry crochet, mosaic crochet, striped colourwork – you need enough contrast between your colours for the pattern to read clearly. Two colours can look clearly different to your eye when held together and still not photograph well, and more importantly, they might not produce a clear design in the finished fabric.

The most reliable test I know is to take a photo of your chosen yarns and convert it to black and white. If the colours are hard to distinguish in greyscale, they may not have enough tonal contrast to make a clear colourwork pattern. Light and dark combinations generally work better than two colours of similar depth, even if they look distinct to you in person.

This is especially worth thinking about in tapestry crochet, where the whole point is that the colourwork shows up clearly. A beautiful combination in theory can produce a muddy, indistinct design if the colours are too similar in tone.

Choosing a colour range with options

If you’re working in tapestry crochet or another colourwork technique, it’s worth choosing yarns from a range that offers a good variety of complementary and contrasting shades. This is partly practical: if you run out of yarn mid-project, you want to be able to find the same colour and dye lot without a difficult search. But it also gives you options if you want to repeat a project in different colourways, or make several pieces that coordinate.

The major yarn ranges designed for craft – such as Stylecraft Special, Paintbox Simply DK, WeCrochet Swish – all have large colour palettes, which makes it easier to find good contrast and complementary combinations within a single range.

The peeping yarn question

One aspect of tapestry crochet colour choice that often surprises newer makers: in some colourwork designs, especially if worked at a looser tension, a small amount of the carried yarn may show through between stitches.

How much this matters depends on your tension, your hook size, and the specific design. But if it’s something you notice in your swatch, you can plan around it. Choosing colours that are closer in tone – a dark navy and a mid-blue, for example, rather than navy and cream – means that any slight show-through is far less visible. It just reads as part of the fabric.

Alternatively, a tweed or marl yarn can actually work in your favour here: if the secondary colour in the yarn echoes your second yarn colour, any show-through becomes almost invisible, or even looks intentional.

If you’d like to understand more about managing yarn in tapestry crochet, including how to keep it tidy and reduce show-through, my post on how to hide yarn in tapestry crochet goes into detail on the techniques involved.

Thinking about colour placement in the design

Once you’ve settled on a palette, the next question is where each colour goes. This is separate from which colours you’re using – it’s about the structure of the design itself.

For a simple striped or ripple blanket, colour placement is mostly about the order of the stripes: which colour appears first, how many rows each one takes, whether you want a gradual transition or a sharp contrast. Playing around with this in your head (or sketching it roughly) before you begin can save a lot of frogging later.

For tapestry crochet and other chart-based colourwork, placement is more complex. Which colour you assign to the background and which to the motif will significantly affect the overall feel of the finished piece. Working the same design with the colours reversed can produce something that looks almost like a different pattern. It’s worth trying both options before you commit – even just as a small swatch – if you’re unsure.

For further reading on choosing yarn specifically for tapestry crochet, including fibre type and weight considerations, there’s more detail in my post on the best yarn for tapestry crochet.

Choosing colours for a stash-busting blanket

Stash-busting blankets have one significant advantage over any other kind of project when it comes to colour: you already have the yarn. You can see exactly what everything looks like, hold the colours next to each other, and make real decisions rather than educated guesses based on product photos.

My usual starting point is to have a loose sense of the palette I’m after – warm earthy tones, something fresh and light, cool blues and greens – and then pull out everything in my stash that roughly fits. From there, I’ll spread the balls out on the floor and start moving them around. It’s a surprisingly useful process; colours that seemed like obvious companions sometimes look wrong in practice, and unexpected combinations turn out to work beautifully.

For blankets using a lot of colours, like a scrappy stripe project, one approach I enjoy is working randomly. I used this method when I made the Canal Boat Blanket (a free pattern from Lucy of Attic 24, well worth looking at if you like a mindful stripy blanket project): all the balls go into a bag, and for each stripe I reach in without looking and pull one out. Once that stripe is done, the ball goes into a second bag. I work through all the balls this way, then muddle them back together and start the whole process again.

When I do this, I try to be genuinely strict about the randomness – I don’t worry if two similar colours end up next to each other. Across a whole blanket, those moments of low contrast can actually add a gentle rhythm to the piece rather than detracting from it. But if you’d prefer more control, you can add a simple rule: if you pull out a colour that’s too similar to the previous one, put it back and try again. Or split your yarns into lights and darks at the outset, and alternate between the two bags – one light stripe, one dark, all the way through. That gives a striped blanket a lot of energy without requiring any precise planning.

Choosing colours for the border

The border is worth thinking about separately, because it works differently from the rest of the blanket. Its job is essentially to frame the piece, and that framing quality means the colour choice has an outsized effect on the finished look.

For blankets that use a lot of colours or have a distinctive pattern, I generally find that a single border colour works best. Multiple colours in the border can compete with what’s already going on in the design, whereas one colour ties everything together and gives the eye somewhere to settle. This could be a colour you’ve already used in the main part of the blanket, or it could be a new colour to lift the rest of the design.

When it comes to blankets that use a lot of colours, my general rule of thumb for the border is to go for either the lightest or the darkest colour in the blanket rather than one that sits somewhere in the middle tonally. A light border lifts the piece and gives it an airy feel; a dark border grounds it and makes the colours inside pop. A mid-tone tends to get lost – it neither frames nor contrasts, it just sits there. That said, it’s a rule of thumb rather than a rule, and the right answer will always depend on the specific palette and your own preferences.

One of the most useful things you can do is try before you commit. When you reach the border, work a small section in the colour you’re considering – just a few repeats along one edge – and live with it for a moment before you continue. If it doesn’t feel right, it’s much easier to re-do a short section than an entire border. This is genuinely worth doing even if you feel fairly confident in your choice: seeing a colour in context, against the finished fabric, is quite different from holding a ball of yarn up to it.

A note on decision fatigue

Colour choice is genuinely enjoyable for many makers, and a real source of anxiety for others. If you find yourself going around in circles, it usually helps to impose a small constraint: limit yourself to colours from one yarn range, or decide on the background colour first and choose everything else around it.

Giving yourself a loose framework tends to make the decision easier, not harder. And once you’re actually crocheting, the colour relationship shifts anyway – what you see in the fabric as it grows is often quite different from what you imagined at the start, and usually in a better direction.

If you’d like to see how a wide range of designers approach this, including their personal methods for finding inspiration and testing combinations, take a look at my crochet blanket colour palettes post.

Keep exploring

It’s also worth saying: it’s perfectly fine to simply copy a colour palette you’ve seen somewhere and liked. This doesn’t have to be another crochet project – it could be a painting, a room interior, a piece of fabric – but crochet projects are an entirely reasonable place to look too. Ravelry is particularly useful here, because you can search for a specific pattern and browse the project photos to see the range of colourways other makers have used. Instagram and Pinterest are good for broader inspiration. Even a simple Google Images search for the type of blanket you want to make, or the colour palette you have in mind, can turn up combinations you’d never have thought of yourself. Seeing a colour palette you love already worked up in a similar project takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.

Colour choice in crochet is one of those areas where practice genuinely helps. The more blankets you make, the better your intuition becomes about what will and won’t work. The key things to hold onto: think about tonal contrast, think about proportions, and don’t rely solely on how colours look on screen.

You can find more resources for crochet blanket making, including guides to yarn, sizing, and technique, in my Crochet Blanket Resource Hub, and more on tapestry crochet specifically — including tutorials and technique guides — on the Tapestry Crochet Hub.

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About Catherine

Catherine is a crochet designer and teacher based in Surrey, UK, specialising in crochet blankets, tapestry crochet, and colourwork. Her designs have been published in crochet magazines, and her work is featured in the book 100 Crochet Tiles. She has designed in collaboration with Sirdar and WeCrochet.

You can find her full pattern collection on Etsy and Ravelry, and her step-by-step video tutorials on YouTube.