Knitting with Color - And Sampling New Colors with Duplicate Stitch

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Daphne Adair, contributor

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Florence yarn colors: pink (of course) plus pale lemon, olive, grape, and raspberry.

Daphne Adair

Step 1: Put the needle in at the bottom of the first stitch to be duplicated.

Daphne Adair

Step 2: Go up and under the existing stitch above.

Daphne Adair

Florence yarn colors: pink (of course) plus pale lemon, olive, grape, and raspberry.

Photo: Daphne Adair

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Take the yarn back down to the bottom leg of the stitch you’re tracing and you’re back at step 1, ready to work the next stitch to the left.

Duplicate stitch can be used to embroider a design on a garment, weave in ends, or as mentioned, try a new color scheme without reknitting a whole fair isle swatch. I no longer have my original swatch for Florence, but I’ve duplicate-stitched a little bit of the hem to show how another color scheme would look:

Here, I've traced over the original raspberry with the pale lemon.

Here, I've traced over the original raspberry with the pale lemon.

Now I've traced over the original grape with olive, and over the original olive with grape.

Compared with the original, I think the background stands out too much and the Xs and Os are hard to read. However, I could've tried swapping out the lemon and olive, or the grape and raspberry, and ended up with a still different and interesting garment. It's fun to test out different colors with this technique.

As you can see, I'm pretty happy with the final product:

Wearing "Florence" happily at the office.

So next time your colorwork isn’t quite going according to plan, don’t rip—duplicate-stitch!

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