I’m fond of stripes. Most of my wardrobe consists of striped t-shirts and pullovers and I’ve knitted lots of striped garments so far.
When I was planning to make a gift cardigan for the baby of friends of ours, I naturally wanted it striped, but to give a twist to the design, I decided to use Reverse stockinette st.
First of all, I knitted a swatch trying different types of stripes with the colors I bought for this project (Malabrigo, SOCK: Natural & Ochre).
Can you guess how I knitted (or purled)?
The answer is ta-da! I put the purled side photo side by side so that we can easily compare them.
Don’t you think the impression of RS (purled side!) is quite different from the WS’s? This is because in Reverse Sockinette st, you have a “transitional row” at each color change where two colors – the head of the old color and the bottom of the new color – are mixed up. And that make these stripes softer.
In fact, I was absolutely not satisfied with the color combination, and replaced the ochre yarn with a mustard one (Cascade Yarns, HERITAGE: #5652 mustard).
With this color combo, Mustard is much stronger and brighter than ochre – and much more yellow than the color of French moutard de Dijon! – , and the contrast with white is pronounced. That’s why I reduced the number of mustard rows on my way, whereas with the first ochre-white combo, you should knit more ochre rows to get the same impression.
The knitted side (= WS!) looks like that.
I tried another color combination with my stash yarn (BC Garn, SEMILLA FINO: ox101 & ox102).
I think it would be harder to guess how the stripes were worked: The wider stripes on the lower side that looks like 1 row are indeed knit with 2 rows, and each series of thin 2 lines on the upper side consists of just 1 row.
I think we can draw a kind of conclusion: the more different and contrasting are the colors in terms of hue, intensity and tone, the less you would use the stronger one – unless of course you aim for the opposite effect.
Finally, I chose 2-row stripes with white-mustard combination to make the cardigan prototype – yes, much fuss for a very banal result! But it’s worth your while testing different stripes sequences.
And here are the finished cardigans.
I’m going to look for test knitters soon. Stay tuned!
P.S. This cardigan is currently test knitted here.