Colorwork knitting and knitting with color can be daunting for beginner knitters. However, incorporating multiple colors into your knitting and gaining comfort with colorwork knitting opens up a world of project possibilities. There are many different kinds of colorwork knitting to explore, from stripes to intarsia to stranded colorwork,  and each will elevate your skills as a knitter. Plus, you’ll learn more about color theory, which colors make you happiest, and how to marry different colors together in aesthetically pleasing compositions.

Color Theory + Choosing Colors

Understanding relationships between colors will help you choose colors that work well together. Here, the color wheel is your friend.

The color wheel contains primary (red, blue, and yellow), secondary (orange, purple, and green), and tertiary (pink, chartreuse, turquoise) colors.

Combining two primary colors creates secondary colors (red + blue = purple), and combining a primary and neighboring secondary color (purple + blue = violet) creates a tertiary color. Adding white or black to any of the colors lightens or deepens the color.

When choosing colors for your knitting, there are three main types of combinations to consider:

• Complementary colors – Colors that sit across from each other on the color wheel
• Analogous colors –  Colors that sit side-by-side on the color wheel
• Triadic colors – Three evenly spaced colors that form a triangle on the color wheel

You can also explore split complementary colors and tetradic color harmonies, but these are slightly more complex. The above 3 color combinations will be the easiest to master. Complementary colors offer high contrast, analogous colors offer a harmonious look because they’re in similar color families, and triadic colors create exciting contrasts. Don’t be afraid to consult a color wheel when choosing yarn colors for your project!

The Desaturation Trick

Understanding color and how different colors work together is the first step towards knitting stunning colorwork. You’ve likely heard the trick of desaturating an image of the yarn colors you’d like to use to test their contrast levels. High contrast levels are important for colorwork knitting. Without high contrast, colorwork can appear muddled, and colors can become lost in one another.

We desaturated one of the Prairie Spun DK kits we featured in our 2025 Mystery Knit Along, which paired Painted Desert, Swallowtail Butterfly, and Mediterranean Olive (above). As you can see, once desaturated, we have a dark, medium, and light color, confirming a good amount of contrast.

Easy vs. “Hard” Colorwork

There are many different methods of colorwork knitting, and they all have different difficulty levels. If it’s your first attempt with colorwork, we recommend beginning with the easiest version (stripes) before attempting something more difficult (jacquard).

You’re working with more than one color at a time, hence more than one yarn at a time, and that will affect your tension at a minimum. Start with the basics and build up from there; the more comfortable you are with basic colorwork knitting, the more equipped you’ll be to tackle harder methods later.

These are the different colorwork methods, in our personal order of easiest to hardest:

• Stripes – Only one color is worked across a row, so no switching between yarn colors.
• Mosaic – Only one color is worked at a time for a minimum of two rows. On rows where a new color is introduced, some stitches are slipped (unworked) to create a colorwork effect.
• Duplicate stitch – Also called “Swiss darning.” Worked after the knitting is finished, duplicate stitch involves stitching over stockinette stitches with a tapestry needle and contrast color.
• Double knitting – A reversible colorwork technique that produces two knit interlocking fabrics where the pattern is shown on both sides, but with the colors reversed.
• Stranded colorwork – Multiple colors knit at the same time, with each color stranded across the back of the knitting.
• Intarsia – Multiple colors knit at the same time, but colors are not carried across the back of the knitting. Instead, each color remains in its specific area and twisted with adjacent colors to prevent holes. Yarn is usually held on bobbins to avoid tangling.
• Ladder Back Jacquard –  Multiple colors knit at the same time, with each color stranded across the back of the knitting using a special laddering technique similar to double knitting.

Color Dominance

When knitting stranded colorwork, you’ll find that one color shows up more prominently than the other. This is color dominance, and it results from which yarn is held above the other at the back of the work, and the distance each yarn has to travel across the back.

In the example above from Modern Daily Knitting, the yellow is more dominant at the top half of the swatch, and the red is more dominant at the bottom half of the swatch. Modern Daily Knitting has an excellent post that dives into color dominance that we recommend reading for more information!

The important thing to remember is you should choose which color you would like to be dominant, and then maintain the same stranding technique to keep it dominant throughout your knitting. When knitting stranded colorwork, the dominant color should strand below the background color. If you knit stranded colorwork with two hands, the dominant color should always be in your left hand.

Turn Your Circular Knitting Inside Out

Maintaining an even tension with stranded colorwork can be difficult. The unused yarn is carried across the back of your knitting—called “floats”—and if these floats are too short, your fabric will lose its stretchiness and elasticity. This is a big problem with colorwork socks, because socks should be comfortably snug, but still elastic enough to stretch over your heel.

One easy trick when knitting in the round is to simply hold your knitting inside out. This will prevent the floats from being too short (ie, too tight) because you have to carry your floats a greater distance to cover the outside circumference.

Match Your Floats to Your Gauge

When stranding multiple yarns, it’s important to keep your floats the right length. As mentioned above, floats that are too short will be tight, making your fabric inelastic and puckering your colorwork. Floats that are too long will make a saggy fabric with messy colorwork, ruin your gauge, and get snagged on fingers and toes (depending on what you’re knitting). So what is the right length for floats?

The general rule is to match the length of your floats to your gauge. If your gauge is 4 stitches to the inch, don’t float the yarn across more than 4 stitches. If your gauge is 8 stitches to the inch (like in the socks above), you can probably get away with floating the yarn across 8 stitches (especially if you knit inside out!). Just remember to twist your floats as you change colors.

Check Your Needle Size & Type

Maybe you love knitting Lamb’s Pride on size 8 needles. You’ve knit dozens of  Lamb’s Pride projects on size 8 needles and always get the gauge you need.

Then you try to knit a colorwork project with Lamb’s Pride on size 8 needles and discover your gauge swatch is off—too tight, or too loose, but definitely not right.

It’s not you. It’s colorwork and tension. Picking up and dropping multiple colors, floating unused colors across the back of the knitting, twisting floats—all of this affects your gauge. The gauge you have in a solid color may not be the gauge you have with a colorwork design.

Before you toss your chosen yarn in frustration, change your needle size and potentially needle type. If the metal size 8 needles didn’t work, maybe the bamboo size 8 needles will be better, or the metal size 7 needles. Try different needle materials and sizes to get the gauge you need. Remember: it’s not you, it’s not the yarn, it’s the colorwork! For more tips for getting gauge, read How to Knit a Gauge Swatch.

We hope these tips help you master colorwork knitting. For colorwork pattern inspiration, check out 9 Colorful Patterns to Brighten Winter Knitting and 10 Colorful Patterns for Happy Winter Knitting—there are some excellent freebie pattern downloads in both!