Yesterday, I wrote about the slip stitch colorwork in the Holland Cowl pattern by Afifa Sayeed for UNIVERSAL YARN Mystical Marl. Today, I’ll talk about stranded colorwork and color dominance using the Mystical Marl in Lagoon and Midnight to show off what this all means.
I suspect many knitters know what stranded colorwork is, but a quick reminder – it’s where you work with two (or more) colors and strand them along the back of your knitted work, creating a very distinct Right Side and Wrong Side. That part is relatively simple (and there are oodles of excellent tutorials out there to help you with stranded colorwork, if you’re ever lost!) What’s not so simple is something called color dominance.
What is color dominance?
Color dominance means that your background color goes over your foreground color when you’re carrying the yarn on the wrong side of the work. See this in action using Mystical Marl Yarn!
When you carry your yarns across the back of your colorwork knitting, you may notice that one yarn sits above the other (in the above picture, the best place to see this is in the vertical center – that’s where the speckles are on the Right Side of the work). This is color dominance. What it means in this case is that the Mystical Marl in Midnight sits below the Mystical Marl in Lagoon. This is important because Midnight is the foreground color, and I want it to stand out. In this example, the Lagoon – the background color – has to travel a little further since it has to go over the Midnight, so those stitches are very slightly tighter. If the reverse were true, the stitches in Midnight would be slightly smaller and thus seem to recede into the background.
This is the tulip motif of the Holland Cowl with the Midnight held dominant, as I want it to be.
Color dominance is so important in colorwork patterns like the Holland Cowl!
But, this is an alternate version of the tulip motif where I tested it out with the Mystical Marl in Lagoon held dominant. You may even be able to see where I switched dominance. The speckles at the bottom of the cowl, where I switched my color dominance, stand out more than the ones between the tulips for this example. The stems of the tulip motif appear thinner than those in the example above. It’s subtle, but it’s there, and it definitely matters!
Color dominance is so vital in colorwork patterns like the Holland Cowl!
Get your color dominance wrong, and it can drastically change the look of your finished project – for a more dramatic visual of this in action, check out this post from the Paper Tiger Blog – especially if you accidentally change dominance mid-project.
But that’s not the only thing that can trip up stranded colorwork. How you strand your yarn behind your work can also cause all sorts of problems, especially if you have long stretches of only one color – and the Holland Cowl has a few examples of this. But don’t worry, that is an easy fix! Join me tomorrow when I demonstrate how (and why) to catch your floats in stranded knitting, using UNIVERSAL YARN Mystical Marl to knit the Holland Cowl pattern.
There are so many more lovely colors to explore in UY Mystical Marl.
This is part 3 of 5 in this series
Go back to part 2: Slipped-Stitch colorwork in the Holland Cowl with Mystical Marl yarn
