Color Pooling vs Color Striping

Q: Madame, would you talk about color-pooling in handpainted yarns?  I gather that striping is the "desired" outcome, but I don't like it. Am I the only one who finds the 'watercolor'arrangement more appealing than stripes? Is there a way to predict how yarn will stripe or pool -- I mean, a swatch won't tell you how the repeats will work over a larger area, right? and doesn't knitting in the round make a different pattern than knitting back and forth?

A: Lots of people like stripes and lots of people like the watercolor effect, or pooling of colors. Sometimes you get both in the same  garment and it's possible to get horizontal AND vertical stripes, too. In general, horizontal stripes result from working back and forth, like you do in stockinette on straight needles. You'll also get little pools from that, and sometimes even bigger ones, depending on how the yarn is dyed and how many stitches you have on your needles. Bigger pooling generally comes from working in the round, but I've also knit it that way and gotten stripes. So yes, it CAN be unpredictable, but usually you can see that in the yarn before you knit it.

Usually you get both pooling and horizontal stripes in the same garment if you knit the body in the round and then work the front and back separately on straight needles, going back and forth. But sometimes it works out opposite to what you expect... and sometimes you get everything in one garment -- like this one on the left! You can see color pooling, horizontal striping and vertical striping, all in the same garment. Each of these effects is a result of the way the yarn was dyed, the length of the hank, and how it was knitted -- in the round or back and forth, and the number of stitches on the needle at any given time.

Actually, depending on how the yarn is dyed and what the put-up is (is it already in a ball, or does it need to be wound?) just looking at it can tell you a lot. The skein on the left is Schaefer Nichole, a wonderful sock yarn. All Schaefer yarn is hand dyed, and generally their skeins are about 54" in circumference. If you look at how this one appears in its twisted hank, you can see that all the colors occur in the same place in the skein. This is a good example of a medium striping yarn, in which you'll get several stitches, but never a whole row, from the same color. We have some skeins in th store that we've rewound at a different circumference. This mixes the colors so that you get a better idea of how they'll look when you knit with them. Both sweaters above were knit with yarn of this type, and you can see that the effect is quite different in each sweater.

The next picture shows a long-striping yarn. This means that each color run is much longer and you may get several rows from the same color. This garment was knit sideways -- knitting sideways is an easy way to get a nice effect with these yarns -- many of us are well past the days when we liked how we look in horizontal stripes! 

This colorful ball and the more subdued one next to it are examples of what this type of yarn look like before it's knit. You can see that these balls show many strands of the same color lying next to each other. Each color section is one continuous piece of yarn. Yarns like this are excellent for sweaters like Elizabeth Zimmerman's Baby Surprise Jacket, because the color lasts long enough to "go around the corner" and allow the beholder to see that the direction of knitting miraculously changed! However, you can easily see that these two skeins will create very different effects. The one on the right will give you each color once in each ball, so each occurrence will be a wide stripe whereas the one on the left will go through each color many times, giving much narrower stripes. You can see that there are some places where two strands of yellow show, and others where there are 5 or 6 strands o f yellow. You can see it in the green and red parts, too. What this tells us is that the striping in this yarn is not regular, it's random. Sometimes you'll get a lot of one color and sometimes not so much of it. But because you can see that the color goes around the ball at least twice, you know that there's much more of it than you can see in our next example. 

Short-striping yarns give an entirely different effect. There are many on our shelves, including the Manos multis. these yarns give you a few stitches of one color, then they move on to another. Sometimes, these yarns will pool for a few rows, then stop, or a different color will begin to pool... or maybe the pooling will move to a different part of the fabric. Sometimes they don't pool much at all. Yarns like this give a very impressionistic feel to your garment, because the eye doesn't focus on any one place for long -- the shifting color draws the eye from one place to another. Look at how this kind of yarn looks in the skein -- you can see that one strand changes color every few inches. 

Now, a swatch can tell you even more than a ball can, but you have to understand how to use it, and you have to do some simple math. Let's start with a hand-dyed, skein-dyed yarn  -- this means that the dyer made the hank first, then dyed the yarn, putting the dye on all the strands in the same area, so all the areas of red, for instance, come in the SAME PLACE every time as the yarn goes around and around the hank.When the hank is lying open [not wound into a ball] and lying flat in its circle, you can see all the places where each color lines up with itself. If you have a skein like that, you can figure out the length of the REPEAT, and use that to figure out what will happen when you knit it.

Here's an example:
NOTE-- this does NOT replace making a tension swatch, which you MUST do first, in order to determine the needles you want to use and to make sure that you have the gauge you desire!!
Say you have 3 colors in your skein, pink, purple and green, and each color occurs once in the loop.
Cast on maybe 30 stitches with some scrap yarn, then start using your space-dyed yarn AT THE BEGINNING of one of the colors (you have to waste the first color on the skein because you probably don't have a full repeat of it). So, if you start with pink, then when you've knitted through the purple and the green and are just about to make the first pink stitch of the next batch, you've used up ONE REPEAT.

Count your stitches -- let's say there are 25 and you're ready to knit another first stitch of the first color. If you cast on 100 stitches (or any multiple of the repeat), join the stitches and knit in the round, the colors will pool into vertical stripes (more or less) ! You've manipulated your knitting so that every time you've knit the yarn that contstitutes one time around the original skein, you're on top of that same color again. By casting on more or fewer stitches -- or increasing and decreasing while knitting -- you can "move" the striping to go in a swirl toward the left side of the garment (fewer stitches) or the right side (more stitches).

If you decide to knit the same yarn on straight needles, going back and forth instead of around, and you start with any multiple of the repeat, you'll get alternating stripes of the first and last colors (pink and green) and a pooled vertical stripe of the center color (purple).

Long striping yarns are a lot of fun, and they are endlessly manipulable... and they're also beautiful when you just knit them and let them so their own thing!