Have you ever tried knitting with multiple colors at one time? It can be confusing! Keeping the different colors from becoming a tangled mess takes practice and patience. What doesn’t help is that multiple terms can define colorwork knitting. Stranded knitting, Fair Isle, and intarsia are among popular vocabulary. How do you get better at a technique when you aren’t sure what to research?! I’ve done the groundwork for you. Below are some tips and definitions to help you spend less time in the knitters glossary and more time making progress on your project.

What in the Word

To learn more about recommended ways of working with multiple colors it is important to know how you define your colorwork knitting project. Stranded knitting, fair isle, and intarsia all have slight variations that make all the difference in a final project. Let’s break down each one to get a better understanding of what each technique does.

Work that Colorwork

Show me your colors! Pictures of sweaters covered in explosions of colors can create envy in the crafting world. What technique do these knitters use to create such stunning and colorful projects? Each of these projects is a variation on colorwork knitting: any knitting where two or more colors are in use at the same time. Pretty simple! Fair Isle, stranded knitting, and intarsia are all types of colorwork knitting. Typically, there are two or more colors on each row of knitting to be considered colorwork. With this definition, rows that are stripes of alternating colors don’t count here. That doesn’t mean stripes don’t have great uses, and they can be a great way to introduce variation into a project without adding too much complexity.

Stranded at the Drive In

Don’t despair like Danny from Grease, with a little practice you won’t be branded a fool in your colorwork projects. To start, the terms stranded knitting and Fair Isle are interchangeable. In this technique, multiple colors are in use within a single row of knitting. Usually the colors are present in a few stitches at a time, and the color not in use is carried along the backside of the knitting. This creates strands of yarn along the wrong side of the work.

One important thing to watch for is the tension of those strands across the back of the knitting. A tight tension causes the front of the project to pucker. Too loose of a tension and holes can form where the color change occurs. When executed correctly, these projects are doubly warm because the strands add an extra layer. The additional warmth is great for winter hats and mittens, like my Ladybug Mittens, which are a great introduction to stranded knitting.

Now Entering Intarsia

Another type of colorwork is intarsia. When I hear the word “intarsia” images of Narnia fill my imagination. Maybe that is because the technique invokes images of mysterious, challenging, beautiful works of art. Or maybe my mind wanders in odd ways. Intarsia involves working each block of color with a separate strand of yarn. For example, if a pattern has four sections, red, blue, white, and blue, use a separate strand of yarn for each section without carrying the yarn across the entire row or breaking off the yarn at each color change. This is a good technique for designs that do not cover the entire width of a project and for projects with large blocks of the same color. Projects like this take more patience and planning to keep all active colors untangled, but the end results can be stunning!

Conclusion

Now that you know more about how to define colorwork knitting, are you ready to cast on? A plethora of colors add dimension to any project. Colorwork of any variety is a fun skill to practice in your craft. Try out different techniques to find what works for you.