What colorwork asks of a yarn
Three things. Grip: the floats behind the fabric should catch on each other and on the stitches, so they stay put, even out with blocking and do not snag. Untreated wool does this; its scales lock lightly. Bloom: after washing, a woolly yarn fills in, hiding the small unevenness between the two colors' tension and making the pattern look printed. Body with a little give: the fabric is two layers thick and wants to lie flat without stiffness.
That describes a plain, plied or lightly spun, non-superwash wool at a firm gauge. It is the yarn Shetland, Norwegian and Icelandic knitting grew up with, and still the best.
What to avoid, and why
Superwash merino is smooth: floats slide, stitches do not even out, and the fabric can look loose and striped rather than patterned. It works — plenty of colorwork is knit in Rios — but at a tighter gauge and with more care in tension, and the floats need trapping more often. Alpaca and silk have drape and no grip; the floats sag and the fabric grows. Cotton is inelastic, so the two-color rows pucker and do not block out. Single-ply hand-dyes are soft and uneven; the colors blur. Variegated yarn fights the pattern — one of the two colors must be solid or nearly so, and both is better.
The wools we stock for it
- Brown Sheep Nature Spun Worsted: a smooth plied wool in more than sixty solids, made for colorwork; the American standard. Prairie Spun DK is its DK sibling.
- Álafoss Lopi: the Icelandic yoke sweater yarn, lightly spun so the floats felt into each other with wear; the Lopi guide covers the family.
- Studio Donegal Darnie: a fine 4-ply lambswool, crisp, for Fair Isle at fingering gauge; its tweed flecks are small enough not to muddy a pattern.
- Blue Sky Woolstok and Woolstok Light: bouncy highland wool in heathers at worsted and fingering.
- Plymouth Homestead, Roam and Hearty Homestead: Peruvian highland wool solids and heathers at worsted, DK and chunky.
- West Yorkshire Spinners Pure DK and Bluefaced Leicester from Juniper Moon: British-breed wools with a little luster.
- Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride: the mohair halo blurs fine patterns but makes bold, simple motifs glow, and it felts into a windproof fabric.
All hand wash, all feltable — the felting guide is the same list seen from the other side.
How much of each color
A yoke sweater is mostly the main color: the yoke takes a fifth to a quarter of the total, split among its colors, so an adult worsted lopapeysa at 900 yards is six or seven balls of the main color and one each of two or three contrasts. A full Fair Isle allover pattern splits the yardage more evenly between the two colors of each band, and a pattern with many colors takes a little of each — the band says, and it is usually one skein per contrast with most of it left over. Buy the main color all at once for the dye lot; contrasts are small enough that a lot change rarely shows. The sweater yardage guide has the totals by size.
Choosing a palette
Colorwork reads by value — light against dark — before it reads by hue. Hold the candidate skeins together and squint, or photograph them in black and white: if the pattern color and background color turn the same grey, the motif will vanish however pretty the pair. One light, one dark, and a third as an accent is the classic yoke; a heathered background softens everything. The Color Board does the squint test on screen, with colorways from different lines side by side on a light or dark ground.
Gauge and blocking
Stranded fabric is firmer and a little narrower than plain stockinette in the same yarn; most knitters go up a needle size for the colorwork rounds, and every pattern says to swatch the colorwork itself, in the round — the gauge swatch guide. Then wet-block hard: this is where wool earns its place, as the floats relax, the stitches even out and the pattern flattens into one surface.