Best Yarn for Colorwork

What stranded colorwork actually asks of a yarn

In stranded knitting you carry two colors across every row, working one and floating the other behind the fabric. Two things then decide whether the result looks like the pattern photograph.

1. Floats have to sit at the right tension

A float pulled tight puckers the fabric. A float left loose snags on fingers. There is a correct tension and hitting it consistently is the entire skill of colorwork.

Wool helps here in a way no other fiber does. Because the fibers grip each other, a slightly tight float is held by its neighbors rather than gathering the fabric, and a slightly loose one is held rather than sagging.

2. Blocking has to be able to fix the rest

Even experienced colorwork knitters produce uneven stitches - your tension in the dominant color is never identical to the other. On wool, wet blocking relaxes the fibers and the stitches settle level with each other, which is why a blocked colorwork yoke looks so much better than the same piece off the needles.

Our how to block your knitting page covers the method, and does wool yarn shrink covers the risk that comes with it.

Why superwash is a compromise rather than an upgrade

Superwash processing removes or coats the cuticle scales so the wool cannot felt. Those scales are precisely the thing that makes untreated wool grip itself in colorwork.

So superwash colorwork is entirely possible and it is less forgiving. It still blocks well, which is most of the benefit, but the stitch-to-stitch grip is reduced. Our superwash vs non-superwash page has the full trade.

Choosing the colors

This is where colorwork projects most often go wrong, and it has nothing to do with fiber.

1. Contrast in value, not just in hue. Two colors of similar lightness will read as mud from across a room however different they look up close. Photograph your two balls in black and white - if you cannot tell them apart, neither will anyone else.
2. Buy from one yarn line. Two brands at the same nominal weight can differ in thickness, and in colorwork that shows as one color sitting proud of the other.
3. Solid or gently heathered, not variegated. A variegated yarn fights the pattern. Heathered is fine and often looks better than a flat solid.
4. Test with a swatch in the round. Colorwork tension differs between flat and circular knitting more than plain knitting does.

Weight, and why colorwork runs finer

Stranded fabric is double thickness - two strands everywhere - so it is roughly twice as warm and twice as heavy as plain fabric at the same gauge.

That is why traditional colorwork uses fingering and sport weights that would be thin for a plain sweater. A colorwork yoke in worsted is a genuinely warm garment; in bulky it is nearly unwearable indoors.

Float length, which the pattern should tell you

A float longer than about five stitches will catch fingers and toes. Good charts avoid it; if yours does not, you catch the float by twisting the two yarns around each other mid-run.

This matters most in mittens, where fingers go straight into the floats, and least on a cushion cover. Wool's stickiness helps here too - a wool float that has been blocked sits flatter than a slick acrylic one.

Yardage: buy more than you think

Colorwork uses roughly the same total yardage as plain knitting for the same garment, but split unevenly between colors - and the split is hard to predict from a chart.

Buy generously in the background color, which is usually 60 to 70 percent of the total, and remember that a mid-project dye lot change shows far more in colorwork than in plain fabric. The yardage page has the base arithmetic.

What we would buy

• First colorwork project: Patons Classic Wool in two high-contrast shades.
• Machine washable, next to skin: Cascade 220 Superwash Merino.
• No animal fiber, or a child's garment: Lion Brand Heartland, and expect to work harder on tension.
• For the blocking that finishes it: blocking mats. On colorwork this does more than any other single thing.