and it also allows you to evenly space out your stitches. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. If theres one thing Ive learned from my students, its that knitters are all over the map as far as which method works best for them. I really love this scarf. What exactly is color work? I watched the video but would like more information & can't seem to find it. 2. Colorwork without stranded floats? So what do I do? too short? When carrying both yarns in the left hand, you may need to use your thumb to hold the floating yarn (blue) out of the way. How to Crochet with Two (or More) Colors - Jo to the World Creations In order to keep the tension of your sock from getting too tight, you may want to consider letting your floats go a little longer without catching them than you normally would; catching floats too frequently can make the fabric less flexible. Remember that there are no rules here and experimentation is key trying a new method often feels awkward at first, and your gauge may shift as you settle into it, but until youve given it a shot, how can you say it wont work? Im trapping my float every 6th stitch as I work across the span of charcoal grey, but you could trap every 5th or 4th stitch as well. The knitted loops create the elasticity of knitted fabrics, while thesestraight sections of yarn do not have much stretch capacity. I get this question a lot, and its a tricky one to answer. Floats can get in the way in the finished project because they can snag and, they can mess with the tension of the knit stitches around them. How to double knit for beginners - Nimble Needles This gives you a chance to check your floats are they too long? For me, lifes too short to purl in colorwork! There are several different ways to manage carrying multiple yarns for colorwork knitting carryingboth yarns in the left hand, carryingboth in the right hand, holdingone yarn in each hand, carryingone yarn at a time, usingastranding guide, and the list goes on! Now that weve covered when its a good idea to trap floats how do we actually do it? Colorwork can be stressful worrying about having the right tension and this new method takes all of that away! combatting tight colorwork - Paper Tiger An inelastic fabric will not stretch to allow your heel to passthrough or pull in to gently hug your leg. How often to catch floats when working colorwork comes down to personal preference. Making mistakes in any technique is inevitable, because were all human! Wrap a tapemeasure around your heel (or your intended recipients heel) andup and over your instep, which is the widest point of your foot,where the sock will need to stretch the most. Needle material(e.g. A yarn like Quince & Co. Chickadee is smooth and springy, because its worsted spun with three plies. Easy Trick To Catch Long Floats - YouTube If youmustuse a general rule, going by length in inches or cm is a better way to go (e.g. There is enough of the contrast grey []. Colourwork Knitting: An Introduction - tin can knits I work the cuff, heel, and toe ofmy socks at a smaller gauge, using a smaller needle, then changeto a larger needle to work the stranded portions. With the sock inside out, you can easily see both thecolor patterning from the previous rounds and the behavior ofyour floats at the same time. CraftyGarden: N. 62 Condor's Croft and Garden 22K views 3. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. How to knit colorwork - YouTube The swatch on top was knit onbamboo DPNs, while the swatch on the bottom was worked ontwo metal circular needles. trapping long floats in stranded colorwork. *Membership cannot be purchased with Gift Cards. free download when you sign up for our newsletter! If you havent tried more than one method, you may not have found your perfect match yet! AKA Both strands on the left. Most color work patterns use a light to medium weight wool yarn our Nature Spun Fingering, Nature Spun Sport, Lanaloft Sport, and Prairie Spun DK are ideal for color work projects. Cotton or acrylic blend yarns are not ideal because they are too smooth to cling together properly and dont have the memory that wool does to hold its shape. Read morehere. Because Im a continental knitter and I carry both yarns in my left hand, that series of photos is first, but if you scroll down youll also find a series of photos demonstrating the same technique in the two-handed method, with one yarn carried in each hand. When you have a pattern that calls for long floats (the strand of yarn that you carry behind the color youre knitting with at any one time), its a good idea to tack them, or trap them. 2. making sure no floats are longer than 1 or something similar). ), Heres the tutorial for you! Please confirm you want to block this member. Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Cookie Notice But, as crafters, we have, Knitting Instructions & AbbreviationsGuide to Subbing Brown Sheep Yarns in Knit & Crochet PatternsGuide to Weaving With Brown Sheep Yarns. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('interstitial-ad');}); Save patterns, share updates, and connect with your community. Go ahead and knit the next stitch normally. There are a few reasons for this, but the big one is thatcolorwork fabric by its very nature is less elastic than normal stockinette. If you've been wishing for a better way, this is it. Now settled backin the mountains of Northern California, Terry enjoys thesocialization of knitting with friends once again. Unknown If you struggle with gauge, keeping your floats consistent, or find it frustrating trying to keep multiple strands from getting tangled - you will LOVE this innovative new approach that will transform your knitting. Marie has taught knitting courses at festivals, shops, and events around the world; her mix of best practices and renegade hacks, along with her charming personality, make her a highly sought-after instructor. Don. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you. Thoroughly soakyour socks in water, then roll them up in a towel to squeezeout any excess moisture. Knitting In the Round 3 Ways: DPNs, Two Circulars, or Magic Loop? click here to sign up for our newsletter & well send you a free PDF download of the Jeanette Hat & Scarf Pattern, Guide to Subbing Brown Sheep Yarns in Knit & Crochet Patterns. It just takes about 1/2 hr to let it sink in and then TaaaDaaa!". This means picking up the float in the back of a stitch to hold it in place and keep some tension in the floating yarn so it doesnt pull too tight or loosen up. The good news is that picking up dropped stitches in color work is actually not hard! A pattern like. Learn to keep perfect colorwork tension - every time, Learn how to adapt any pattern to use the strandless method, Learn how to read charts with strandless knitting in mind, Start with the basics and practice as you learn, Take your skills to the next level with progressive lessons that make it easy to apply what you learn, Practice right along with me as we knit a strandless project together - step by step, Learn from the comfort of home - on your favorite device, Your lessons never expire - you'll have ongoing access to the workshop if you need a refresher. With this weather were all having, doesnt this scarf sound tempting? This looks like a really fun project, and the authors have included a little tutorial about how to deal with long floats, too, which is one of the challenges lots of Fair Isle knitting projects. With practice, youllfind the right balance. This pulling can also really tighten your gauge and make garments too small. Locking the unused (floating) yarn in stranded knitting every other stitch creates a gorgeous back that almost appears woven. [] used Dianna Wallas tutorials for dominant strands and trapping floats. I don't want to have long strands of floats inside the hat, nor do I want it to be too tight. Like Alex I am interested in tidy float catching, working on a sock flat heel (stranded patterning a feature on it) ..so purling involved. The Japanese word ajiro describes a herringbone pattern in basketry, which seems fitting for a country known for its long fishing traditions and bold graphic representations of natural elements. It may take some trial and error to get the hang of it, but Ive seen this method yield results for several people. Insert your right-hand needle into the next stitch, but dont wrap your working yarn around the needle yet. And keep in mind thatmistakes are an important part of the process:we can learn from them. Instead of carrying the yarn used for the colorwork all the way around, when you get to the point where you switch back to the main color, just let it hang until you need to start using it again, the pull it loosely back to the beginning of the colorwork section. Once you have gone over all the puckered fabric in this manner, repeat from the start - until the floats have stretched sufficiently. Knittersgenerally find that their gauge is tighter, with more stitches perinch, over stranded areas than plain stockinette stitch. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. Let the socks dry onsock blockers to help them keep their shape (Photo 7 below). Yarn choice. Ive completed a few stranded colorwork projects in which I had to switch position of the yarn balls every time I trapped a float: trapping a float without taking my hands off the needles was a revelation and a relief! This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. You can read aboutcolor dominance here.). . By clicking Accept, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. Whats the process for trapping non-dominant float? Im trapping my float every 6th stitch as I work across the span of charcoal grey, but you could trap every 5th or 4th stitch as well. Fair Isle knitting, also known as stranded colorwork knitting, is a technique for working two (or more) colors of yarn in the same row. I havent written it up in a blog post, but I covered trapping the non-dominant float in my video on Youtube about stranded colorwork. Whether you're brand new to colorwork knitting or have years of experience under your belt, this innovative new way to knit colorwork will transform your knitting! Fair Isle Knitting Tutorial for beginners - Nimble Needles We'll also talk about how to apply this method to all your colorwork projects. Its possible to trap those long floats as youre weaving in ends after the fact (and if there isnt a long end to weave in where you need to trap a float, you can take a spare bit of leftover yarn and just weave it into the wrong side of the fabric as if it were an end, trapping the floats as you go). my first fair isle project , last project and I'm making another rainbow one with variegated ribbing. We just don't get along. The wrong side of the sockwith the floats will be outside (Photo 3 below). Lopi, on the other hand, is typically woolen spun and a single ply, which means it just wont stretch as much. This allows you to carry the yarn you aren't knitting with across the back of the work as you go. According to designer Courtney Kelley, This scarf was inspired by a picture in Handschuhe, a vintage knitting book from Germany by Eva Maria Leszner. This was so helpful! This distinguishes it from other colorwork methods like mosaic knitting or intarsia. 2. Strandless colorwork eliminates so many of the headaches that some knitters experience with traditional methods. The amount of elasticity you can achieve will also depend on how the yarn was spun and how many plies it has. Please note: Colorwork Without Interlocking Floats - Technique Tuesday That being said, theres a great deal of variation in how stretchy colorwork fabric is from knitter to knitter. Make a swatch topractice spacing your stitches on the needle until youve had somesuccess and know how much space is too much. You can seein the photo abovethat Ive worked the first 5 stitches of my 21-stitch span. The standard double knitting technique with two colors also creates no floats on the backside. Now I'm making adult totoro mittens with a more complicated pattern. 9 Tips for Knitting Stranded Colorwork Socks | Interweave Please, for the sake of your sanity, choose a pattern thats knit in the round! *Membership cannot be purchased with Gift Cards. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. The culprits are the strands, or floats, which are lengths of yarnnot being knitted and simply carried along the back of the fabric. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. I may seem biased in encouraging you to knit with wool, but seriously the natural barbs in wool fiber will cling together, helping the stitches to stay in place. "Floats" are the yarn that's carried behind the stitches across a row. Holding the main colour in my right hand (English) and the contrasting colour in my left hand (Continental). I thought it would be a good idea to finally address this issue! 32K views 4 years ago Color Work Knitting Series This video is part of my Colorwork Series. The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes. If you can pick up a regular knit stitch, then you can definitely pick up and fix a dropped stitch within a section of color work. Read morehere. Problem is, my yarn gets tangled every time I twist my stitches to weave in the floats in the back so I don't have long lines of floating yarn for fingers to snag on. If you stop here and look at your float, youll see that its caught in the space between the stitch you just knit and the previous stitch. To create a float that is the right length, spread out the stitches on your right needle just before you change colors. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Archived. For example, if there are 3 stitches in a row of one color, the other color will need to be carried behind it for 3 stitches. Happy Monday, everyone! In fact, for a single knitter, theres variation in how stretchy their colorwork fabriccan be, depending on: Its important to consider theelasticityof your colorwork fabric, and to remember that it wont necessarily correspond with yourgauge since gauge is measured with the fabric resting (i.e. Some wools that areknownfor colorwork are very sticky wools, like Shetland wool or Lopi. You can always try going up a needle size, as well many people need to adjust needle size between stockinette sections and colorwork sections when using the same yarn. Colorwork knitting inside out for socksfrom Melissa B Its better to stagger the tension so you dont end up with one column of stitches pulling towards the inside of the project. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. For more information, please see our Are there any other pages/videos showing this technique? I dont enjoy trapping floats very much, as it slows down my knitting and can affect the look of my knitted fabric, and Ill avoid it if I can get away with it. Then work the first stitch of the new colorthis is the yarn that creates the float. Most socks are knitted a tad smaller in circumferencethan the actual measurements of your calf and foot; theelasticity of the knitted fabric generally allows them to stretch. Our Jeanette Scarf is a nice choice because its knit in a small tube in the round (its also available as a free download when you sign up for our newsletter!). But because sticky wools are more likely to stay in place and the yarn is less likely to slide smoothly past other strands, the finished fabric is generally less elastic than it would be with smooth wools (and it can be tricky for colorwork beginners to achieve smooth results without puckering). Make it a point to check the gaugeespecially on thecolorwork portionsthroughout yourproject, andmakeadjustmentsif you find yourself getting tighter. We just dont get along. Colorwork Without Interlocking Floats - Technique Tuesday Alpaca Direct 8.4K subscribers Subscribe 1.1K views 1 year ago ALPACA DIRECT, LLC Kelley Hobart from Alpaca Direct shares tips on how.