Doing Stranded Colorwork with Two Hands – Knitting Technique

Color work is a fun and easy way to make very beautiful knits. Whether you’re doing a traditional fair isle pattern, a quirky modern pattern, or monogram, color work enhances many different knit pieces.

When first starting color work a lot of people realize some of the draw backs to stranded color work. They typically start out holding the yarn in one hand, simply switching the yarns as they knit. While this isn’t necessarily wrong, it can cause some issues in your work. The floats are either too long or too tight, they’re spending more time untwisting the skeins instead of actually knitting, the gauge is inconsistent, and they get puckering in their knits. Frustrations from these can cause people to give up color work all together.

One technique to make stranded color work much easier is to use a two handed knitting technique. It’s mostly beneficial when using two colors, but can help reduce the twisting of yarn when using more than two colors as well.

How to do Two Handed Stranded Knitting

To use two handed knitting, you’ll need to know how to knit both continental and English styles of knitting. While they’re both similar, the difference is where you hold your yarn. In continental knitting, you’ll hold your yarn in your left hand (similar to crochet) and “pick” the yarn as you need it. In English, you’ll hold the yarn in your right hand and “throw” the yarn to yarn over. The important thing in both styles of knitting is that the yarn is going around the needle in the same direction (counter clockwise).

When doing two handed color work, you’ll be using both continental and English styles of knitting together, holding one yarn in each hand. For your left hand, you’ll want to hold your contrasting color or which ever color you want to “pop” more. For your right hand, you’ll hold your background or main color. Then, you knit in accordance with your pattern, using the yarn from both hands as needed. The important thing to remember is to not switch the yarns or twist them as you work.

For a demonstration of how to use this technique, please watch this video.

Not only does this method keep your yarns from becoming a tangled mess each row, but it allows your contrasting color to be more dominant in your work and truly stand out from the background. This is especially helpful when using two similarly shaded colors in your color work.

I hope this explanation helps clarify how and why to use this technique to better your color work. Please leave me a message in the comments to let me know if it helped or if you have any questions.

Happy knitting!