Minor Key Mitts: Blending for the Northman Mittens

Editor’s Note: In her Winter 2025 Spin Off article, “An Artist’s Approach to Carding Color,” Kim McKenna describes using value keys to organize color on a blending board or set of handcards. While we crave color, value often plays an underappreciated role in the success of a project. Value refers to the relative lightness and darkness of colors. It can be divided into keys that let you see the progression of color as a scale that runs from light to dark.

There are so many ways to use Kim McKenna’s technique of using value keys to select colors for spinning and knitting! In the En Plein Air Half-Mitts pictured on this issue’s cover, McKenna used value keys to design a tweed-like four-ply yarn, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Here’s how she used value keys to blend the same colorways for a classic stranded colorwork project.

If you didn’t know it, you might not guess that both the Northman Mittens (left) and En Plein Air Half-Mitts (right) were spun from the same colorways. Photos by Matt Graves

Much like a color wheel helps us define relationships between colors, a value key helps us define relationships between values. A value key is a range of values that may be used together in a piece of art. Value keys are what evoke feelings and have an emotional impact in our work. I most often use value keys when designing warps and rolags. Major value keys contain a broad range of values from one end of the value scale to the other, while minor value keys possess more closely related values and make use of a narrower range of the value scale. Because a major key contains a full range of values, it will have large areas of contrast among light, medium, and dark values. The narrow range of values in a minor key results in less contrast.

The main color in the Northman Mittens by David Schulz is a dark, rich Prussian blue that serves nicely as backdrop for the contrast color, a lightly striated warm white. Both yarns were spun from minor value key rolags, but with a twist. For these minor value keys I did not load the board in a predictable striping pattern, as I did for the En Plein Air Mitts by Diana Twiss. Instead, to add a bit more interest to the yarn, these minor value keys were created by placing the fiber on the blending board in thin layers and by leaving a few gaps in coverage here and there. This allowed each layer to peek through in places to the layer above and below. This still creates a minor value key, but the effect is slightly more random. 

For the Northman Mittens, McKenna used the three darkest values of her braid, shown at the bottom of this scale.

Blending the Main Color: