It’s important to have a bit of contrast amongst your colours in order to see the details and crisp lines in the fabric. Solid, semi-solid, and lightly speckled fingering weight yarns are all great options for this year’s shawl. Try to avoid using very busy variegated and highly speckled yarns for all of the colours. It’s okay to have some painterly splashes for some of your colours, but I recommend crisp clean contrast for this year’s shawl. Think about your 4 colours as a crescendo of colour with colour A as the lightest colour and colour D as the darkest colour. We will be using each colour individually in order from A to D, rather than fading/blending the colours together. Knit the recommended swatch to get a good representation of this year’s colour relationship.Superwash and non-superwash wool yarns will both work beautifully for the shawl. If you prefer to knit with non-wool fibers, then feel free to substitute your yarn with a cotton or cotton blend quality. Alpaca or silk blends would also be beautiful drapey fibre options. When you sign up by purchasing the pattern on westknits.com or Ravelry, you will receive a detailed introductory PDF demonstrating the types of colours and contrast effects that work best for this design.