KNITmuch | Issue 06

Shadow knitting with Sweet Roll Yarn
Sweet Roll by Premier Yarns is a repeat self-striping
yarn and is ideal for sprucing up shadow knitting
with worry-free color changes.
Shadow knitting is a great way for beginners to do
colorwork without knitting with two colors at the
same time on the same row. It involves knitting 2
rows in one color and then 2 rows in the next color
and then alternating back and forth. The strands of
the unused color are loosely carried up the side of
the project where each color row begins and ends.
When you do this, you basically get stripes. If you
only knit you get garter stitch ridges, and if you
knit one row and purl one row you get stockinette
stripes, like these.
Sweet Roll yarn stacks up to your most imaginative ideas. The Punch
Pop colorway features lavender, bright turquoise, and a rich teal.
Shadow knitting was initially developed in Japan
and roughly translated, it’s known as ‘fine knitting’,
which doesn’t really hint at the optical illusion that it
creates. If you’d like to learn more about this history
of shadow knitting and see more patterns, I’d
recommend this Interweave book Shadow Knitting.
Stripes of 2 rows of each color
If you look a little closer at the pattern, you’ll notice
that on a few of the stripes things look a little wonky.
Perhaps to the untrained eye, it would look like a
mistake. But these irregularities my friend, are what
make shadow knitting what it is. If you look at the
knit fabric surface from any angle that’s shallower
than a perpendicular bird’s eye view, you’ll start to
see some changes in the color and the texture of
the fabric, and what you’re seeing are the shadows
that the alignment of certain stitches creates.
On this scarf, you’ll notice a series of L-shaped
blocks arranged in a motif that’s called a Greek
Key. I made up a simplified version of a Greek Key
because some of them can get quite complex and
have a variety of corners and parallel lines.
38 KNITmuch | issue 6
History of Shadow
Knitting and many
patterns can
be found in this
volume by Vivian
Høxbro.