Lacy pattern in dark, variegated yarn?

[rivenwanderer]

I'm contemplating knitting a Damask shawl from Malabribo Sock yarn from my stash--the Abril colorway, which is a fairly dark purple-and-navy variegated thing. (Some reasonably representative pictures found on Flickr: one, two)

I fell in love with the Damask pattern because of the lovely curving stitch pattern. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that if you want a stitch pattern to show up, you can use varigated yarn, or dark colors, but not both. How true is this? Should I seek out a lighter and/or solid yarn for my Damask and use the Abril for stripey socks or something? Or should I go for it?

Comments

I think you should go dark

[jazzypom]

I love seeing the juxtaposition of delicate lace stitches with rich, sublime saturated colours, and you do find whilst knitting that the yarn seems lighter in the knit than it does on the ball. Also, if you wear a lot of white or pale colours, the lace will go wonderfully with it.

Man, I wish I could do lace. I'll start off relatively okay, then hit row 22 and turn into an utter dyslexic because I get so utterly confused. I can read charts for cables and fair isle no problem, but with lace, I get all a twitter. And yet - I can't read line by line instructions of lace, my brain goes all tl;dr.