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

[uninvitedcat]

I recently started knitting the Matilda shawl in a fine, variegated green/purple/blue yarn. I'm finding it's coming out a little bit like camoflage patterning - would be happy to try and take a decent photo and put up if you like? But, the colour change is quite short/speedy on this yarn, so you may find with a more gentle colour change it looks fine.

For an example of a variegated yarn shawl, you could look at a recent example of mine here. I think it came out quite well overall!