Jared Flood explains color dominance in stranded knitting
A Brooklyn Tweed tutorial on achieving professional-looking colorwork through proper strand management.
Summary
Jared Flood demonstrates color dominance in stranded knitting, a technique that determines which color appears more prominent in the finished fabric. He explains how to identify dominant versus background colors in any pattern, why maintaining parallel strands matters, and how to hold yarns correctly to achieve consistent results. The tutorial covers both two-handed and single-handed knitting approaches, emphasizing that proper color dominance creates clearer, bolder motifs and more professional-looking colorwork.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Understanding Color Dominance
Jared Flood: Greetings from Brooklyn Tweed. Today we are talking about Color Dominance in stranded knitting. This may or may not be a term you've heard before, but if you are a Color Dominance knitter and you're trying to improve the professional look of your finished fabric, Color Dominance is a really important way to do that.
What is Color Dominance? Color Dominance refers to which of your two colors in stranded knitting is prominent versus receding to the background. Sometimes you'll see in patterns that you're given a Color Dominance indicator, like which color is dominant, which color is background in a chart. Our charts in our Brooklyn Tweed patterns do have Color Dominance indicators, but you don't need one of those in order to employ these techniques. Most of the time you won't get one of those when you're looking at a chart.
I want to start by talking about how do you decide what is a dominant color and what is a background color. Those are the two terms we're going to be using to talk about this today.
Whenever I'm looking at a motif — I have two different motifs here, let's look at this one — and I was assessing this pattern, this is a Color Dominance yoke sweater swatch, I would say which of these two colors is dominant and which is the background. Sometimes it's really easy to tell. In this case, this lighter color, the white color, is like line work drawn over a dark background.
One trick that I like to do if I'm wondering which is the dominant color or not is: if someone handed you a blank piece of paper and a Sharpie and they said "draw this pattern," what is it that you're actually going to be drawing? I would draw these diamonds. Whatever I'm using as my line in the drawing is what I would use as my dominant color in the knitting. In this case, I would be using the white as dominant and the blue as background color.
Why Color Dominance Matters
Jared Flood: Now, why is this important? Well, it does have an effect on the finished look of your fabric. I've done a swatch here where I held one Color Dominance on the right side and one Color Dominance on the left side to give you guys an example of how this looks different.
You can really tell the difference on the back of the fabric where the darker green floats are really prominent on this side and the lighter green floats are prominent on this side. Floats have an impact on this, so we'll talk about those as well.
If I was assessing this pattern here and I did the drawing test, I would have drawn this big zigzag and I would have drawn these little dots, this little dot pattern here. I would have decided that the darker yarn in this case is the dominant color and the lighter yarn is the background color. What I did here is used the correct way of doing it. I held the darker Color Dominance here on the right side, and then I flipped it and held it as the background color on this side.
Now, you might look at the swatch and say, "Wow, that's incredibly subtle. Why should I care?" Well, this is just a small swatch, but if you blow this concept up to an entire sweater or an entire project that's covered in Color Dominance motifs, and you were to look at one next to the other — one that used proper Color Dominance and one that did not — you'd actually notice quite a big difference in how clear and crisp and bold those motifs look. It's just a really good foundational concept to sort of get in your head before you're working any major Color Dominance project so that you can make sure that your finished results look really professional.
One point I'll make with this swatch is Color Dominance really shows up when you have small motifs. If you look at the small dot pattern on the right side, you can kind of see how these dark dots are slightly bigger than these dots. You can see these dots here — they almost get eaten into the fabric and disappear. That's because they were being held as the background color, so the lighter color was sort of overtaking them. Again, just to show you the difference on the back.
That's the general concept of what Color Dominance is and why it's important.
The Structure of Stranded Fabric
Jared Flood: Now let's talk about what's actually going on in your fabric to make this happen. I've drawn a little diagram here to help explain the structure of what's going on in stranded fabric.
When you're working stranded knitting, you're working every single row with two colors at a time. You're holding one in the right hand and one in the left hand, traditionally. As you're working stitches in one color, the stitches of the inactive color are floating across the back of the fabric. For every stretch of, say, five stitches in the light that I have here, I have a corresponding float of five stitches in the back using the darker color.
That's kind of what I've tried to show in this diagram here. This line of blue and orange indicates the wrong side row of one row of stranded knitting. As I see this orange float here, that means on the right side I'm working some stitches in blue. As I see the blue float here, that means on the right side I was working stitches in orange.
The most important thing to know about Color Dominance is that you need to keep your strands parallel to each other at all times. In other words, you want one color that's always stranding above and one color that's always stranding below. In this case, the dominant color is always the one stranding below and the background color is always the one stranding above.
There's a really easy way to remember this: the background color is always the one being held in the right hand and the dominant color is always the one being held in the left hand. You can always keep track of it that way, based on always carrying dominant in my left, always carrying background in my right.
Demonstration: Two-Handed Approach
Jared Flood: Let's take a look at this in practice. I've got a swatch here that I've been working. This is the same motif from here. I just chose a couple different colors — the blue and orange. I've chosen the blue as my background color, as you can see, and the orange as my dominant color, which you can see.
I'm going to start working a row here and show you how I'm holding my yarns based on all the stuff that we've talked about so far. Let me keep this little reminder right next to me.
I'm working with blue and orange, and following our key here: dominance always on the left side, background is always on the right side. The first thing you want to do is actually place your yarns on either side of you. If you're sitting down, you can put the background color off to your right and the dominant off to your left. This is going to be a trick to kind of help us make sure we're doing this properly, because if you're properly stranding and you're keeping your strands parallel at all times, these yarns will always be separate from each other. You'll never have them twisting around each other because they're always remaining parallel as you work. This is a great way to start.
First, let me make sure that I am starting with no twists, so let me untangle these real quick. Now you can see I've got my background color, this darker blue, coming off my knitting to the right, and I've got my orange dominant Color Dominance off to the left.
Full disclaimer: I do not Knit Dominance work one in one hand, traditionally, but I'm going to show you how to do that since that's the traditional way to work Color Dominance. Then at the end of the video I'm going to show you how to do this if you, like me, are someone who holds both colors in one hand as you work. You can also do it that way as well. If I look a little awkward holding my yarns this way, it's because I am, but I should be able to demo the technique anyway.
I'm going to be working a row of five by three, just where I happen to be in my pattern. I'm starting out at the beginning of the row needing to work three stitches in the dominant. Again, I want to just show you how my yarns are coming off: background on the right, dominant on the left. That's really important.
When I need to go in next, I need to work three orange stitches. These are three dominant Color Dominance. Let me go in and work those: one, two, three.
Now I need to work three stitches of the blue in the pattern. As I go into the next stitch to work for blue, I want to sort of hold this up so you can see. When I go over to knit the stitch, you can see that the blue yarn is going over the orange yarn. This is stranding above on the wrong side. I'm going to go over there, do three stitches here in blue.
Next in my pattern I've got a stretch of five stitches of the orange. Again, my yarns are held parallel. I'm going to be going in and grabbing the orange.
You can see I'm halfway through the row and I've done a couple different Color Dominance, as we've seen. One thing I want to point out is that my two yarns are still making this kind of Y shape away from my live row of stitches here. If I was to set my yarn down at any point in the project and I saw that there were some twists in my yarn — meaning before they split out they were twisting around each other — for every single twist you see, that would have been one time where I improperly floated, meaning the one that was supposed to go above accidentally went below, and so on and so forth.
Checking your yarn like this is a nice trick to kind of check your work and see how good your form is in terms of maintaining Color Dominance as you work. If you've made a few twists, no big deal. It's just one way to make sure that you're staying on track. You could undo those, make sure your yarns are separate again, and then continue working across your row and sort of maintaining that check.
Background color: I'm working three stitches with background with my right hand, and then I've got five stitches of dominant with my left hand — four, five. Then again with my right, as I work I'm automatically stranding over because of the way I'm holding the yarns. You continue in that manner all the way throughout your project.
Once you've internalized the concept of dominant color, it becomes very natural and easy to just incorporate this through your knitting. Here you can see, again, I finished that row.
Assessing Your Pattern
Jared Flood: To bring back our original swatch, a couple things I'll point out now that we've done this technique in practice: you may have your dominant Color Dominance throughout your project. You really want to assess your pattern. The reason that I did this swatch is because I start down here with the light color being the background, but I end the swatch up here with the darker Color Dominance the background. There might be, given whatever motif you're working, there might be times where you're flip-flopping the relationship based on how the pattern looks.
In this swatch, I kept very disciplined about having the darker Color Dominance on this side and the lighter Color Dominance on this side. One way you can notice that is by looking at these diagonal lines. You can see when the dominant color is just making this fine diagonal of just a single stitch floating on the background, that the dominant in these is a little bit larger. You can sort of see here that over here the green stitches touch the back — the darker green is kind of touching here — and so these small light stitches sort of separate out from each other. Whereas over here the lighter stitches are touching, so it just creates a little bit of a bolder, clearer line on the diagonal.
Again, as you work, assess what color makes sense to be used as dominant given whatever portion of your motif you're working. But in general, the best practice is just, if you're just starting out with this, pick one and stick with it throughout, and you'll have a consistent look all throughout your fabric.
One-Handed Approach
Jared Flood: That covers Color Dominance in theory and also shows you how to do it with a two-handed approach. I'm also going to show you as an extra how to do the same thing but holding both colors in your right hand. That's how I Knit Dominance when I'm doing two colors. I'm a little more comfortable that way, and I just want to demonstrate that it doesn't matter how you hold the yarns as long as you're maintaining that concept of parallel floats throughout, with the background above and the dominant below, or the background held on the right and the dominant held on the left.
I'm going to start this in the exact same way that I did before, which is first deciding what's dominant and what's background. In this case, my background color is the blue and dominant is orange. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to set these colors off to the sides, because even though I'm working with one hand, the concept of the yarns twisting around each other is the same. These yarns should always remain separated regardless of how I'm holding the yarn.
The way that I work with two colors is that I have two yarns held in one hand and I'm using my hand to pivot when I switch back and forth. Now you'll notice that if I was to, even though I'm holding the yarns like this, if I was to sort of hold my hand up like that, you can still see that I've got this orange color off on the left and the blue on the right, even though I'm holding them sort of sideways like this. As long as I maintain this relationship in my hand as I'm working, the same thing will be true. These colors will never be twisting around each other. They'll remain separated.
Let's get started. I've got to start two stitches in the dominant color, the orange, so I'm going to go ahead and do that: one, two.
Then I've got two stitches in the background color, the blue. See, as I was knitting orange that way, I'm going to pivot my hand and pick the yarn up to go that way. You can see the blue is going over top of the orange as a result. It's remaining in that parallel float relationship.
Now I've got one stitch of orange, and I'm going to pivot my hand again. You can see as I throw that orange, it's staying beneath. And two blues, three oranges.
You see, it's very fluid. Because of the way I'm holding my yarns, I don't even really need to think about whether or not one is being held dominant or background properly, because I've set my hands up in a way that keep the yarns parallel the entire time.
I'm going to go ahead and finish this row. You can see I'm a lot faster this way than I was the other way.
As I drop the yarn, look at that — my two colors are still parallel with no twists. I remained one above and one stranding below the whole time. That's how you carry your yarns to have proper Color Dominance and color work.