Improve Your Stranded Knitting

Stranded knitting is a classic way to add color to your knitting, allowing you to create intricate patterning, motifs that repeat across the knitted fabric, and more. The technique has a reputation for being tricky, and it is a big change to start knitting with two or more colors per row. But there are some straightforward tips and strategies that will help you improve your stranded knitting.

Here are some essential techniques to refine your stranded colorwork skills, plus articles for further reading!

Understanding Floats

Karen Frisa beautifully explains floats in her article from Interweave Knits Fall 2020. Here’s an excerpt:

“The term “stranded knitting” comes from the loose strand, or float, of unused yarn that is carried across the back of the work. It’s important that the floats are just the right length. If they are too long, the extra yarn will work itself to the right side, and the stitch at each end of the float will be too big. If they are too short, the piece will pucker, and no amount of blocking will correct it.

Improving Float Tension

To create a float that is the right length, spread out the stitches on your right needle just before you change colors. They should be about as wide as the stitches in the previous rounds. Then work the first stitch of the new color—this is the yarn that creates the float. Don’t pull hard on the working yarn, and your float should lie nicely on the wrong side of the piece.

If you practice spreading out the stitches when you change color but still find that your floats are too short, you can turn your piece wrong-side out and knit it that way. Because the outer circumference is longer than the inner circumference, your floats will naturally be longer than they would be if you were knitting right-side out. Note that you will still be knitting every stitch; you will just be doing it on the far side of the circle rather than the near side.”

Related: Products to Make Stranded Knitting Easier

Locking Floats

This technique takes just a little more time, but makes the back of the fabric appear woven and creates an even tension. It’s a good way to make flat projects like wraps reversible.

Here’s Kyle Kunnecke on how to do it:

Maintaining Gauge Between Stitch Patterns

If your piece has single-color stockinette stitch as well as stranded knitting, you may find that you need to go down a needle size or two in the single-color section in order for the tension to be consistent across the sections.

Stranded Knitting Methods

Many knitters start out knitting with one color at a time, dropping the yarn every time the pattern calls for a yarn change. While this works fine if you can get a tension you’re happy with, it will slow you down a lot.

Related: Switch Your Grip: Take On the Stranded Colorwork Challenge

You’ll be able to knit a lot more quickly if you can adopt one of the following methods:

Yarn Dominance

It matters which hand you hold the yarn in. The yarn held in the left hand (or to the left if you hold both yarns in one hand) shows more prominently on the surface of the fabric. This is called “yarn dominance”—the yarn to the left.

Example of Yarn Dominance

Here’s Karen Frisa again to share more about yarn dominance:

“The swatch of stranded knitting below was worked with the black yarn in my left hand from the lower edge to the middle, then with the black in my right hand from the middle to the top. If you can’t see the difference between the top and bottom halves, cover the top half and look at the bottom half, then quickly slide your hand down to reveal only the top half. Can you see the difference now?

It’s easy to tell in the way the floats lie on the wrong side.

Interestingly, this does not have anything to do with the tension of the yarn. The phenomenon is also seen in machine-knitted samples. The yarn that floats lower on the wrong side of the piece creates a slightly larger stitch. For handknitting, this means that the left-hand stitches are slightly larger than the right-hand stitches.

If you switch colors based on the number of stitches in a row, or if you arbitrarily pick up the colors, you probably won’t notice the difference in your piece while you’re knitting. But later, when you’re standing back and admiring your work, you will probably notice that something seems a little funny, a little off—it’s subtle, but it’s there.”

Related: Interweave’s Top 7 Stranded Knitting Patterns

Fixing Mistakes in Stranded Colorwork

In general, when you find a mistake in stranded colorwork, you should tink or frog back to the mistake rather than trying to ladder down to fix it. You simply won’t be able to keep your tension if you ladder down and change the color of a stitch.

You can also use duplicate stitch to fix mistakes after your project is finished!

Working Stranded Knitting in the Round vs Flat

Stranded knitting is often worked in the round. The right side of the work is always facing you, making it easier to see the pattern that you’re creating and to catch errors quickly, and you won’t have to work purls. However, there are some things you have to keep in mind as a result of working in the round.

Correcting for the Jog

One problem with working stranded knitting in the round is the jog in the pattern that occurs where the beginning and end of the round meets. When knitting is worked circularly, it actually creates a spiral. This means that the stitch at the end of the round ends up adjacent to the first stitch of the next round.

This causes the entire pattern to shift up a round at this point, and the pattern becomes distorted. This distortion is called a “jog.” Luckily, it’s not too difficult to correct!

Steeking: In-the-Round to Flat

Working in the round means that you’ll have to cut your knitting to create armholes (and a front opening if you’re making a cardigan). This is generally done with steeking.

Tips for Working Stranded Colorwork Flat

You can also work stranded knitting back and forth. It will be more difficult to see your patterning on the purl side, so you may want to take an extra second to look at the right side after a wrong-side row to ensure you haven’t made any mistakes before moving on.

Keep the pattern color to the left and the background color to the right on both right-side and wrong-side rows. This will maintain the yarn dominance.

Choosing a Stranded Colorwork Palette

Many people find choosing a palette to be one of the most intimidating parts of stranded colorwork. You can use basic color theory, combined with learning to trust your own innate color sense and preferences, to choose palettes of two or more colors. Nancy Shroyer has some great tips:

Working Three (or More) Colors Per Round

Sometimes you’ll encounter a pattern with three or even four colors in a round. Here’s Karen Frisa with some more tips:

“In that case, you have a couple of options. “You can work the round using all of the colors, holding them in your right and left hands. This can be a little cumbersome, but it’s usually only for a round here and there, so it might not be too painful.

If you prefer, you can work the round using two colors (presumably the two that occur the most), then later duplicate stitch the other color(s) in place. This is simpler when knitting but more work when finishing.”

We hope you now have the confidence to tackle any stranded knitting project!

This article features excerpts which originally appeared in Interweave Knits Fall 2020. Originally published to web 8/24/2020. Updated 6/19/2023.