Intro to Stranded Colorwork // Technique Tuesday
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- Опубликовано: 16 июл 2024
- This video is the first in a series on techniques for knitting stranded colorwork. In this video, I show examples of stranded colorwork, and explain the two greatest challenges for working stranded colorwork: managing two colors at the same time, and maintaining even tension.
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Link to my Interweave Knits article on stranded colorwork tension: www.interweave.com/article/kn...
To jump right to a specific point in the video, click on the adjacent timestamped link:
Introduction 0:00
Examples of stranded colorwork: 0:35
Managing two colors at the same time: 3:20
Method 1: drop and pick up: 3:56
Method 2: both colors in same hand: 4:52
Method 3: one color in each hand: 6:38
Managing tension: 9:06
How stranded colorwork can affect overall tension: 11:43
Ravelry Group *Rox Rocks*: www.ravelry.com/groups/rox-rocks
Facebook: / roxknits
Twitter: / roxmpls
Hey Roxx! I'm a 20 yr old boy from India learning to knit and you're like the grandma i never had!! No one in my family knits/crochets and watching your videos gives me all the info i need!! Thank you and lots of love ❤❤
I'm 15 and just starting out on colourwork, I've been watching loads of videos but this one was really helpful 😁
Your suggestion to break it down into the most basic parts has really helped. I haven’t knit English style for years and first knitting 2x2 colors showed me that English knitting was causing the gauge problem, then practicing English knitting on its own is helping to fix the problem. Thanks so much!
Thank you for explaining the difference between the techniques of color works. When following a pattern it’s not always clear what technique is used, so you hope for the best. Your videos are so educational without just showing how to do things to get result. Tnank you again!
Thank you so much.
Besides being a skilled knitter you are also a gifted teacher.
I am starting my first colorwork swatch so this episode is perfect.
I'm at that point in my knitting where I'm ready for the challenge of stranded color-work. This tutorial is timed perfect for me. Your style of teaching as well as your video demonstration are perfect for my style of learning (many I've viewed are not). Thank you for sharing your expertise!
Love, love, LOVE your style of teaching. I am preparing to teach a color work class, so I'm watching some videos to keep some tips and concepts fresh in my mind. Thank you for the thoroughness of your technique videos. 👍💖
Good luck with your class!
This is great to help the beginner to use 2 or more colours when knitting. It gives great tips & ideas for how to practice the colourwork! THANK YOU!
Dear Roxane, I am a new knitter and absolutely love your videos! Thank you! Your techniques have saved me many times already.
OMG thank you! I'm doing a pandemic tunic for me using this technique and initially it took me 1/2 hour to do 157 stitches....I didn't know WHERE or how to hold the yarn. You are so helpful!
Great saying no pull tension ! Thank you and happy knitting
Great topic! For me I hold one yarn in each hand as I learned English first and then Continental years ago. We are starting a true Fair Isle hat in our class very soon so this topic couldn’t have come at a better time! I have done stranded knitting off and over the years but this is more about choosing our designs and utilizing graph paper etc. Very excited to start my project and to watch this series with you. Thanks for this great topic!
Great tutorial! Can't wait for next week's video ; )
Thank you for this series Roxanne. I just re-learned to knit/purl (from a right-handed thrower to a Norwegian knitter). It is amazing to me that we can still learn new tricks and retrain our "muscle memory" as you called it. It's actually very handy to know different ways to knit. There is a Norwegian male duo (whom you may be familiar with) and for stranded knitting, they keep one colour in left hand (Norwegian method) and use their right hand (throwing) for the other colour. I agree that much practice is important - it may be a while before I attempt anything more than swatches. Thanks for all your efforts and sharing your fountain of knowledge on your channel.
You are amazing at teaching! Thank-you so much for this vid, it's so well done!
thank you! i’m very encouraged after watching this to try!
I made that ladybug sweater...hardly a perfect knit, but I was young and still learning. It taught me a lot and it's still around 15 years later.
Gosh you are such a good teacher! Can't stop watching these videos!
Excellent tutorial! You explained things clearly. Thank you
I've been struggling with my stranded knitting, your video really gives me hope! Thank you!
I'm so glad you found it helpful. (Thanks for the coffees!)
I have always wanted to learn how to do stranded knitting. 😍
Very helpful. Those sweaters are amazing
Great timing! Watching up those great ideas into my socks, gloves, mitts and yikes/D
I found a handy tool for separating g your color strands with rings you wear. I ordered mine from Amazon and happy with the product. I also got the Peacock 🦚 Ring for crochet tension ring in silver. Thanks for your wonderful tutorials!!
Great video! It really helped me how you show different ways to do it as well as both showing English and Continental. I am a continental knitter myself, and I often find it a bit hard to understand a technique when it's shown for English as the strands are held completely differently.
I’m starting to learn this technique. So far it’s been very challenging to handle both colors and keep tension especially the second color.
Very good tutorial. I haven't attempted colorwork yet, but this will be a good reference for when the time comes. Thank you!
Exactly what I was looking for! And very clear instructions, as well as trouble shooting. Thank you so much.
Thank you Roxanne 😊 your videos are wonderful!
Glad you like them!
This is a great tutorial and answers so many questions I had about stranded work as a beginner. Thank you!
You are so welcome!
This is a very well-done introduction. Thank you for a wonderful lesson. I will watch the whole series you've done on this.Thanks!
You're very welcome!
Thank you for these tips. I've picked my first color work project and was trying to learn in the round. This is going to help so much. 😄
Glad it was helpful!
Thank you so very much. Very good advice and teacher .
Listening to you and watching you gives me hope. 😊 Have always given up on stranded work in the past. Also on double knitting. 😩 So perhaps I’ll give it another go. Maybe you could do a knit-along using stranded color work? Something small and simple? haha. Thank you.
Great tutorial and tips! Thank you
Very informative! Thanks!
Thank you! Awesome video!
Awesome video. Thanks.
Mittens of Latvia!!! Excellent choice in books ;)
this was awesome
I so want to give stranded colorwork a try but fear over takes me .... your video gave me have hope. thank you
Brilliant tutorial, thank you! Never thought to go up a needle size 😅
Thanks. For video i am new to knitting and love ❤️ ❤️ learning new things is this hard to do
Very helpful.
Love it amazing
Many thanks
nice video. thanks
I'm wanting to start color work, but have been very intimidated by it as I'm a self taught knitter With no one around me to ask in person lol. I've seen many videos so far and this is by far one of my favorites. I love your tips and explanations. I also love that this is a series as other videos have tried to cram all the info into one video and I felt none of it was explained well enough for a beginner like me to really understand. It's almost like you need some experience to understand other videos even if they say 'beginner' haha. Thank you so much for this and I look forward to continuing the series after I've worked on these great first steps. You're a life saver!! Subscribed for sure!
13:24
The RAZOR BLADE jumper!!!!!
Your so sweet.Thank you very much!
Love the “you need to stop 🛑 doing that.” 😂. An the idea that you can practice off sweater is so simple but would not have occurred to me.
totally off topic -- but something I thought you might want to look into. The most recent podcast (episode 30) from The Yarn Hoarder, starting approx. 40 minutes in, concerns fibers for spinning from her preferred source, as well as what she considers a most helpful book.
Love your videos! Do you have a good beginner pattern you could suggest for a fair isle hat? I am also a fairly new knitter, but have managed plain or colour block hats, and just finished my first mittens
Hi Roxanne,
I have not tried color work yet but plan to. Do you have a video on adding a new yarn color with socks? I’d like to do contrasting cuffs, heels and toes but I can’t come across a good video. Do you have one?
I was very happy to see this as the topic!!!😄 My question is probably already in next week's episode, but just in case it's not, I thought I would go ahead and ask now. I am planning some Christmas socks with a little design on just each side of the socks. A tree of snowman, something I can't decide what yet. What I'm wondering is if I will have to carry the color strands around the entire sock as I am doing the main color on only on the front and back of the sock?
Is this a color block design, then, or a stranded color work design?
Well I'm not quite sure how to place it. It's a design I made myself, and if it was going to be just on one spot in the sock, it would be color blocked. I want to put it on the outside and inside portion of the leg. Each design is .25% of the total stitches. Leaving .25% MC between each design. Hence my confusion, on how to approach it.
Hi there. Loving your video! I am a loose knitter and find it difficult when using 2 colours to keep the tension. It always looks as though there are ‘gaps’ where I’ve knitted different colours. Any suggestions? Jane
Very useful, thank you. Do you have an opinion about the Norwegian Knitting Thimble?
Really informative video. Do you have any tips for avoiding the yarns tangling as you switch back and forth between colours? I seem to end up in a big tangle!
If you're rotating floats, they will twist around each other. You can rotate in the other direction for a while, until they're untwisted.
I'm looking how to start from the very beginning. I don't see how you attach the colored strands to the work. Thanks for this tute.
😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
Do you have a video that teaches from start to finish how to knit socks?
Would you consider a knit-a-long mitt of Latvian design like you are knitting now? It's beautiful.
Thank you, Roxanne. I love how you go into depth about things. My question is about tension with stranded colorwork. When the issue is that the floats are too tight, I often see advice to knit inside-out (so that the floats run around the outside of the "tube" of knitting). The reasoning being that then the floats have to travel farther so they will be looser. Do you have thoughts on this? It seems to me that the only place this might make a difference is on floats between those two stitches when we change needles (for example from one DPN to the next, or from one circular to the other), because regardless of whether we knit in the usual configuration or not, our needles are straight for many stitches before and after whatever one we're working on. So for example if knitting a sock with 5 DPNs, we might loosen the float a bit 4 times (when we changed needles) while for magic loop or two circulars it would only affect two floats. That doesn't seem enough to make a difference to our tension even for a small tube like a sock. And surely for something larger like a sweater yoke, two looser floats won't help tension issues. Does that make sense?
The outside of a tube has a larger circumference than the inside, so there likely will be a small amount of extra yarn for each color change, not just at the "corners" where there is a transition from one needle to another. The way to confirm whether or not it will make a difference in your knitting is to work some swatches with the same yarn and needles, and same stitch pattern, and then compare.
So how does this work if you hold the right hand needle like a pencil?
I have found when I knit with two colors, I have little holes above where I change colors. Why does this happen?
Trying my hand at stranded color work for the first time during Quarantine. I love the gloves with the dogs on it. I looked for a similar pattern on ravelry and couldn't find one. Do you know where the pattern came from?
The stitch pattern is from a stitch dictionary called Alterknits. There's a link in the video description to an article I wrote for Interweave on stranded colorwork tension that includes this particular swatch, and at the end of the article is more information about that particular book.
Roxanne Richardson thank you so much! I'm a dog walker. Several clients are continuing to pay during the stay--at- home order. Knitting them thank you presents :).
Thank you, this was amazing! What is the pattern with the little dogs on it?
It's a stitch pattern from Interweave AlterKnits stitch dictionary.
Okay I don’t know if I’m just doing it wrong but say if you’re doing two colours but then for the next row you want to use just one of those colours what do you do with the other colour? Just let it go? Because I let it go and then when I wanted to use it again it was at the bottom so I just pulled it up but then there was a random bit of string going across the whole thing.
First, you need to drop that color so that it hangs to the WS of the work. You can let it hang before using it again for a couple of rounds, but more than that, and you're probably better off cutting it and rejoining. Without knowing more about the specific situation, I can't say otherwise whether carrying the yarn up several rounds on the WS will work. It'd be easier to work it out on Ravelry, where you can post a photo of what you have done, with a link to the pattern page for your project.
Roxanne Richardson
Thank you so much I have managed to solve it, I think what I had is called a float and I didn’t know that I had to attach it to the colour that I’m using, because I’m making a poncho and if someone was wearing it and it had all of those floats then they’d keep on getting snagged on it.
Thank you for your help!
Would this method work if you plan on using more than two colors per row?
Hello, thanks for the video, i have a problem with the socks that i start from the leg. The arrow of the jersey is suppose to create some little hearts but the hearts are on the wrong side. I am knitting on round... i suppose that for having the arrows on the right way i had to start from the toe but its really annoying to restart from the beginning. Its there an other way to continue ?
I'm not clear on what you mean by "little hearts" and "wrong side." Are you talking about the appearance of an individual stitch done in a contrast color, so that the \/ of that st looks like /\ when viewed as it will be worn? Or are you talking about a group of sts knit in a contrast color to form the image of a heart, and that's upside down? Or are you saying that the knit side of the stockinette fabric is appearing on the inside of the tube as you knit, rather than the outside? Rather than sort this out in the comments of this video, it would be more beneficial (to you, to me, and to others who might learn from the question and answers) if you would post your question in my Ravelry group. There is a link to the group down in the video description.
I learned the heartbreaking way not to pull my stitches tight when catching floats. I have a hat that is beautiful and that would otherwise fit if there wasn’t effectively a band of tight floats on the inside making it far too tight to be usable. I’m working on my second attempt at stranded knitting on another hat and it’s very hard to go against my habit and not tighten my stitches, but I also fear I’m having the opposite problem now where my stitches look much bigger on the return in the round so I’m worried I’m being too loose. I have a “once bitten, twice shy” attitude towards this now haha. I just hope I’ll find a balance.
Have been knitting for years using one colour or, at the most, simple stripes. Recently I decided it's time to try more complex stranded work, soon reaching the conclusion that circular needles will obviate the need for purling. No problems with yarn tension or colour choices, or following charts. This video was my last chance to learn other details, after being frustrated by so many other Yt and Pinterest offerings. After watching it and repeatedly trying the fake circular method with floppy floats, am sorely disappointed that it's just an awful, totally unwieldy, frustrating mess. I give up.
I do colorwork but I'm doing the purl side
Thank you for the video Roxanne . One really basic question ,and I am probably being a bit thick here, but is colour work always executed in the round ? The reason for asking is that you don’t show how to work the reverse side .
There are different types of colorwork. Some are more easily worked flat, some are more easily worked in the round, some (like duplicate stitch) are applied to the fabric after it's been knit. Some projects might include a combination of colorwork techniques. Stranded colorwork is typically knit in the round; intarsia (color block knitting) is typically worked flat.
The first video in my playlist on colorwork explains the different types. ruclips.net/p/PL1AZxTfSCe2ciu_XbYOVClammwvqVzIiy
There should also be a link to the playlist at the end of each colorwork video on the end screen.
Your video is the only one I can find similar to my situation, as it has floats, and I am carrying 2colors. I am knitting a blue hat. After 8 rows of blue, knit on circular needles, I am starting a checkerboard pattern of 4 knits of white, then 4 knits of green, then 4 knit rows of green and 4 knit rows of white. What I can't figure out (I took a class and the teacher started it for us, and really didn't show how to do it) is how to get the 2 colors of white and green yarn started on my circular needles after the 8 rows of blue! I don't think your video showed that. In other words, how did you attach the 2 yarns (blue and red) to begin your color work? Thank you in advance!
Hi. Your Videos are very helpful.🧡🧡🧡🧡🧡 In germany there aren't helpful Videos.One question. Is there a rule how man stitches i have to increase sehen i'm knitting colorwork socks. I try to knit colorwork socks but they doesn't fit but i don't want to use a bigger size needle.
Many knitters will knit the circumference to match their ankle size, rather than make it smaller, because stranded knitting doesn't stretch as much as single-color knitting. So you don't need to go up needle sizes, but you will probably have to use more stitches.
@@RoxanneRichardson Thank you😊 I have watched your Video for make different heel sizes and i'll try it again. I Think I have to practise a lot😅. Your Videos are really great😍 greetings from germany. Janine 🤗
How do you knit pattern repeats on a stranded colorwork chart that does not show a red box? I am working on a pattern that has a 6 stitch repeat with seven rounds but there is no redbox that shows the repeat .I don't understand what that means. Any help would be appreciated.
How wide is the chart? Is it 6 sts wide? If so, then there is no need to box the repeat because the chart is the box. The red box is used when you have sts that need to be worked in the row that are not part of the repeat. The sts outside the red box are worked once, and it's the sts inside the red box that are repeated. If there isn't a box around the repeat, then everything is repeated.
@@RoxanneRichardson thanks for your help this makes sense now
can you recommend a good book for beginners that contains charts and info.
Different books offer different things. Many of them focus on particular knitting traditions, so those charts will be focused on motifs common to that tradition. Alice Starmore has a book on just Fair Isle, and another called Charts for Color Knitting that has charts/motifs from many different traditions. The Art of Fair Isle Knitting, by Anne Feitelson has a great chapter on color theory in stranded colorwork that's really nice. Interweave has a nice stitch dictionary called Alter Knits, that includes some good reference material in the front, and has really cool, contemporary charted designs. It just depends on what you are looking for.
thank you.@@RoxanneRichardson
when you say going up one needle size you mean going from 3mm to 3.5mm or 3mm to 4mm?
I mean going up a needle size within whichever system of needles you use. So if you use American sizes, and you use a US 4/3.5 mm needle for solid stockinette, then try a US 5/3.75mm needle for stranded colorwork. If that's not enough to match stitch gauge, go up to a US 6/4.0mm needle. If you use metric needles, and you use a 3.5 mm needle for your solid stockinette, then the next size up for you would be a 4.0 mm needle. It's like any swatching. You may need to swatch in a couple of different needle sizes to find the right match for you.
If you swatch both types of stockinette with the same needles at first, you'll see what the actual differences are in your two gauges, and you may be able to judge more accurately how many needle sizes to jump. If you know what gauges you usually get for certain needle sizes, you may notice (for example) in the medium size needle range that you go up or down .25 st/in every time you go up or down a needle size. So if your gauge difference between your solid stockinette and stranded stockinette on the same needles is .25 st/in, then you could guess that going up a needle size for the stranded might work for you. It's very likely that with practice, your stranded gauge could change, as you settle into a method of handling the two strands, you become more relaxed, and have a consistent method of managing your floats. Not everyone needs to go up a needle size. I used to be so paranoid that I wasn't stranding loosely enough, I ended up spreading my sts really wide (introducing extra slack into my just-completed stitches as I spread them, and then more slack when I over-drooped my floats), which enlarged them. I had to go *down* a needle size or two when I knit stranded color work.
thank you so much, i'll have to try a swatch or two, i'm excited to start
Where are 😊the videos downloaded to?
I'm afraid I don't understand your question. Are you asking where links are to other videos mentioned in this video? Check the video description for those links.
Can someone please show the back of the knitting
There's a playlist of colorwork videos on my channel. This was the introductory video that demonstrated options for handling two stands. The next video talks about managing the floats and shows how the results on the back change, depending on which method you choose. ruclips.net/video/CaMjH8AqW0s/видео.html
Todos los videos que salen con estos dibujos , ninguno sale subtítulos en Español 😠
They never show themselves casting on do they? Flip sake.
I can't think of a situation in which the cast on method chosen is relevant to how the technique of stranded colorwork is executed. Is there something in particular you were hoping to see?