They were going to be photographed for the Tup Knits book, so it was worrying. I was knitting the Droving socks, and although the creamy contrast colour stitches in the main colour background stood out well, the little blue lice* in the middle of the contrast colour stripe up the back of the leg did not. They were virtually undetectable between the larger stitches to either side of them. Those poor little lice were a victim of ‘yarn dominance’, and I knew it! Fortunately, after much deliberation, I was able to apply this knowledge to develop an easy way to make those little lice stand out as much as the contrast colour stitches did in the rest of the sock.
Yarn dominance is an unavoidable effect in stranded knitting that results from the way the two yarns, main colour and contrast colour, interact on the wrong side of the fabric. Because of this interaction if the main colour yarn and the contrast colour yarn are consistently carried in the same way during knitting (and if you want a neat result, they should be!) then in the finished fabric the stitches of one of them will stand out more than the stitches of the other. I explain why in the video at the bottom of this post.
When I was knitting the Droving socks I carried the two yarns, main colour and contrast colour, in the same way throughout. I held the main colour English style, in the same hand as my working needle, and I held the contrast colour in the other hand, continental style. Held this way the main colour always carries over the contrast colour, and the contrast colour is therefore dominant, making slightly larger stitches at colour changes. That’s why the main colour lice stitches were disappearing in the contrast colour stripe.
What did I do about it? The obvious thing is to swap the yarns around for the stripe, holding main colour for continental knitting and contrast colour for English knitting, but that’s not what I did. That would have been a lot of putting yarns down and picking them up again, and I wasn’t willing to repeatedly do that. It would have slowed me down a lot, and I needed speed.
Fortunately there are ways to swap the way yarns lie at the back of the work without letting go of either yarn, and if you’ve got my book Stranded Knits, or have done a stranded colourwork class with me you should know them, because I cover them when teaching how to trap floats. Whenever you trap in the floating yarn at the back of the work, ie weave it in, then you are swapping the way the yarns lie.
This then is the method I applied to my contrast colour stripe conundrum. I knitted all the contrast colour stripe stitches in the manner I use when trapping in the main colour, and I knitted the main colour lice stitch in the manner I use when trapping in the contrast colour. It was quick and easy to do and the resulting stripe looked great.
Don’t know how to do this? You can learn these methods from my tutorial on trapping floats, from my book Stranded Knits, or directly from me in one of my classes. I’m teaching ‘Advanced Fair Isle‘ on Sunday April 30th at The Sheep Shop in Cambridge.
*Not nits, but single stitches in one colour among stitches of another colour!
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