A First Step into Colour-work

A couple of weeks ago on the blog, I shared my little vision board of knitting where I told you about my knitting goals for the second half of this year and how I was going to use some of this stash of mine to make some projects that have been sitting in my knitting queue for a while.

You won’t believe it, but I’m proud to be announcing that I’ve finished my first project of the list – a Banff Hat!

This cute, little hat is a pattern by Tin Can Knits, who make beautiful simple designs that are sized from baby sizes right through to adult sizes, and it’s my first ever colour work project. Now I know most knitting projects give you a shot of joy once they’re finished, but this cute hat is such a short, quick project that it’s little a little shot of knitting joy because it could really be knit up in a day or two! After knitting on my featherweight cardigan for the last four months and feeling like it just wasn’t growing, this little project was just what I needed to get me excited about knitting again!

What I loved about this project is that the pattern itself is well written and really simple. It’s a great one to start with if you’ve never done colour work before because it’s a relatively small project that’s quick to knit up, but you still have the time to understand the technique, if you get what I mean.

During the making of this cute, little hat I learned two things : colour dominance and keeping your floats loose at the back. I’ll admit, I actually made this hat three times – the first time I got half way before I realised that my colour dominance was wrong, the second time I got almost to the end before I realised that my floats were too tight, then the third time was just right!

Colour Dominance

If you’ve yet to dive into the world of colour work, then an important thing to learn is colour dominance. Colour dominance is where one colour stands out against another, like in this case the blue of the pattern is more eye-catching than the grey background around it and this is all to do with the organisation of your floats at the back!

I’d heard of colour dominance before through this post on the Ysolda Teague blog and the beautiful posts on the Knitsonik blog, but it didn’t click until I had actually completed my first run of knitting. I remember being half way through the pattern and thinking, “There is something wrong; the pattern isn’t showing well.” before having a vague memory about something called Colour Dominance. A quick check of my book “Stitch n Bitch Superstar Knitting” confirmed that it was indeed a thing and I’d better rip it all out and start again.

So in the case of my Banff hat, I really wanted the pattern to be the dominant visual point of the hat, which meant I really needed the blue to be eye catching, and how you do it is pretty easy : I carried the blue floats underneath the grey background colour. This means that the blue stitches are bigger because to carry the yarn underneath takes more yarn and so they are more dominant.

I knitted the first version with the blue floats running along the top meaning that the background was more dominant. Sometimes that might be what you want, but it wasn’t for this project so I had to start again with my yarns in the right order!

Just to remember; the rule is this : the colour that you would like to stand out in your knitting must be carried along underneath the colour you would like as a background.

Knitting with Floats

This finished object was knitted using magic loop. As I’m sure you’ll know by now if you’ve been following the blog, I find magic loop difficult and have had problems with it in the past, but it’s always good to persevere and try again every so often with techniques you find difficult so I decided to give it a go. The problem was that I was so scared of having ladders in my work (this was a gift knit after all!) that I was pulling it too tight at the edges and with that and the colour changes and it looked as if there could be a seam on both sides. It was an absolute disaster!

A handy tip I picked up from the Stranded Dyeworks Podcast and the Stitch n Bitch Superstar Knitting book was to knit it inside out as in purl the hat instead of knitting it. That way your strands have to travel around the outside of the work and it should give it the ease it needs to move. Although I was extremely disheartened to hear that my gut was indeed right and it needed to be frogged again, it was probably the best tip I’ve received so far in my knitting journey.

Now it’s beautiful and I’m proud of this little knit! The letti-lopi yarns were a dream to work with, just because they’re quite toothy, as in they almost stick together. It made the whole experience quite enjoyable to be working with yarns sent all the way from Iceland to be making a colour work project and now I can’t wait to tackle my next one using yarns from Norway!

Have you done colour-work before? How did you find it? Do you have any tips for learning how to hold the yarns properly? What are your favourite colour work patterns? Please leave a comment and share them below!