Yesterday I figured out what I wanted to make with my wonderful bounty of UNIVERSAL YARN Mystical Marl Yarn. Today, I have to figure out how to actually make the pattern work with two different colors of yarn, and see if all my planning holds up!
The beginnings of a Sunshine Throw Blanket with stripes of Mystical Marl Yarn
Now, in theory, you can stripe almost any piece of knitting, no matter what the pattern says. In practice, however, that doesn’t always hold up. Anything with short-rows can stripe unevenly, while textured patterns of knit and purl can show the colors on the wrong-side of the work. So if you’re adding stripes to a pattern that doesn’t call for stripes, you must do a bit of pre-planning just to make sure it does what you want it to. And yes, the same advice applies if you’re using a gradient or self-striping yarn, too, if the pattern doesn’t call for it, you’ll want to do a bit of planning before you start.
So, what sort of knit stitches stripe best? Well, the best is stocking stitch, though garter stitch is a good runner up; but with garter stitch you can only change your colors on the right side of the work. If you have a stitch that has knit and purl stitches in the same row (like ribbing or seed stitch), you’ll quickly see that doesn’t work well at all, as the purl stitches allow the other color to show through where you really don’t want it to, and you can see that here on the wrong side of my Sunshine Throw.
Why picking where you change your color is important: looking at the wrong side of the Sunshine Throw Blanket
For more detail: what you’re seeing is the wrong side garter stitch edge of the Sunshine Throw. And, you can see that on the garter stitch edge, the colors don’t change smoothly in a single row. They also don’t change smoothly on a single purl row either, with the ‘head’ of the stitch – that little top bump, being visible from the row before.
What does this tell us? It tells us that, if you’re striping in garter stitch, you need to switch colors starting only on a right side row. If you’re striping in stocking stitch, you can switch colors whenever.
For this, the Sunshine Throw pattern works really well, since the lace is knit on a background of stocking stitch, so, I could theoretically stripe wherever I want to. Great! So the next question becomes, how thick do I want my stripes, and do I want all my stripes to be the same thickness?
Personally, for me, the answer to the second question is ‘yes.’ I want my stripes all the same size. It makes counting rows and repeats so much easier if the stripes are all the same size, plus it means I’ll use up the two colors of yarn more evenly. So, now we go back to the first question: how thick do I want the stripes?
Honestly, this is a personal choice. But, I decided I’d keep things easy on myself and work the stripes according to the 8-row stitch repeat. That means I don’t have to have any kind of second stitch counter for the stripes and can use the same stitch counter for both the stripes and the stitch repeats. My only question was if I wanted to change colors every stitch repeat, or, every two stitch repeats, and, for this I went with my gut. My instinct said that if I changed colors every two stitch repeats, the stripes would probably be thicker than I would like. So, I started knitting the blanket and alternating colors every 8 rows or, every vertical stitch repeat. And I liked how it looked, so, I kept going!
And, as I kept going, my stripes started to zigzag. But why would they do that?
Well, that’s tomorrow’s explanation. Join me tomorrow where I explain why my stripes aren’t perfectly straight, and what you can (and can’t) do about when knitting a lace pattern like the Sunshine Throw.
This is part 2 of 5 in this series
Go back to part 1:
