Double Knitting Tutorial!

ETA: I wanted to give a big thank you to everyone that has used this tutorial, shared it with others, and given. I'm so happy that you've found it helpful, and I would thank you each personally if I could. If you have completed a double knitting project after seeing this tutorial - share a link to it in the comments, I would love to see your work! 

I have received some anonymous questions in the comments that I can't respond to individually, so I thought I would put the answers here (they might be helpful to others?). 

1. If you're going to use a pattern that calls for double knitting, you shouldn't have to change any of the numbers in that pattern (for example the number of cast-on stitches), they should have already (hopefully) taken that into account when writing the pattern. 

2. There was some confusion when I said purl or knit "every other stitch" below. You won't skip any stitches, just switch back and forth between the stitches. In other words: when you are working a row, you will end up working every stitch, you will purl one, knit one, purl one, etc. Hopefully that helps! 

Finally ~ I've created a new blog, Seasoned, with my sister, and if you like any of the work I've done on Winter Foliage, I think you'll like the new space. Please come over and check it out! 

I've been encouraging a lot of people to try double knitting. There might be some other good resources on the web, but I like the process of double knitting so much that I decided to put together a tutorial. I took pictures (A LOT OF PICTURES) for each of the main steps, and I'm going to write up a small description of the process. If you have any questions or need clarification, let me know.

This is going to be a two part tutorial. The first part covers basic double knitting. The second part will incorporate a design by switching the colors to create a design. I'll post part 2 early next week.

I'm writing this with the assumption that you're making a scarf or other flat item,

--Decide upon the number of stitches for your scarf. You're going to cast on twice the number of stitches plus 1. For example, if you want a scarf that's 15 stitches wide, cast on 31 stitches. (I'm using only 19 stitches for this example).

For this example, I'm using one light and one dark color. I choose to cast on with the dark color and use an odd number of stitches so that i start and end each row with the dark color, as you'll see, this produces a dark end on all sides of the item.

--First Row--

Knit the first stitch, and every other stitch using the dark color.

Add the lighter color by just tying it between the first and second stitches. You'll weave in the end of this yarn when you're finished.

Bring both the dark and light yarn to the front of the work. You will now purl the next stitch and every other stitch with the light yarn.

**Important - whenever purling a stitch, make sure that both yarns are brought to the front (as in the above picture). Whenever knitting a stitch, make sure that both yarns are brought to the back of the piece(as in the next picture).



Continue knitting and purling everyother stitch until the end of the row. When you look at your needle, every other stitch should be the lighter color and the row should begin and end with a dark stitch:

--Second Row--

At the end of each row, the yarns have to be wrapped (this keeps the two sides of the piece together). I do this by taking the dark yarn and bringing it under the light yarn before starting the next row.

For the second row, you will purl all of the dark stitches and knit all of the light stitches. **And remember that when purling, you should move both yarns to the front of the piece and when knitting you should move each of the yarns to the back of the piece.




After a couple of rows, you should begin to see the development of the two sides:

End of part one! Enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.