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

[hugh_mannity]

I think it would work. It's a strong pattern, not too airy and the colour changes are subtle and within pretty much the same palette.

There's variegated yarn and then there's ZOMG!TEHCOLORZ!!! variegated yarn -- that really won't work for anything beyond stockinette or a 3x1 rib.