How to Make Your Own Ombre in a Knitting Project

An easy way to change the look of a knitting project is to knit stripes instead of working in a solid color, and one fun way to make stripes is to use an ombre palette.

Ombre simply means graduated colors, so you might use, say, several different shades of blue in a project (I did this on a pair of mitts in my latest book).

If you’re not sure how to make your own ombre, Red Heart has some great tips on its blog. The sample swatches show crochet, but it works the same in knitting.

The post lays out several options for making color choices and combining them in a project, whether you do solid stripes like I did on my project or work with several strands of yarn at once and change out colors one at a time for a more blended effect. Either way, making a project ombre is a lot of fun.

Have you ever knit an ombre pattern before? I’d love to hear about it!

Looking for more Ombre Knitting patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

[Photo via Red Heart.]

Next Pattern:

I don’t even know what to say about this amazing knitting pattern. The Bestiary Scarf from Monstra & Mirabilia is so full of details it’s a little intimidating to talk about.

It features, as the designer describes it, an “artistic encyclopaedia of Western mythical creatures.”

The pattern includes a dragon, harpy, Medusa, chimaera, centauress, phoneix, kraken, mermaid, sew serpent, cyclops, wyvern, Pegasus, amphiptere and amphibaena. (It’s a good thing there’s a photo of the proejct with everything labelled because I definitely didn’t know the names for everything.) It’s also designed like a landscape, with water and land creatures toward the bottom ends and sky creatures toward the top.

The dragon is at the center and is worked sideways so it will show as upright when you wear it.

The scarf is worked in double knitting, so the colorwork appears in the opposite colors on the other side.

It’s worked in light fingering weight yarn (on size 0 US or 2mm knitting needles) and the colorwork is shown in charts. The pattern also includes some video tutorials and written instructions to help you along. The designer says the pattern is for intermediate knitters, and “advanced beginners may succeed with patience and the help of the video tutorials.”

When I was an advanced beginner this kind of a pattern would have brought me to tears, but if you love a challenge, and a project that you’ll wear and get tons of astonished reactions every time, this is the project for you. And of course if you have a few double knitting projects under your belt and are comfortable reading charts, this project shouldn’t be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. But lots of great things take time, and that’s never stopped us before, right?

You can get a copy of this pattern from Monstra & Mirabilia on Ravelry.

[Photo: Monstra & Mirabilia ]

Comments

Sharelise says
July 3, 2015 at 4:44 pm
I would prefer to buy a skein of yarn already dyed in ombre, rather than having to buy so many different skeins and then having to figure out what to do with all the leftover. Of course, it would depend on what the project is and what kind of effect you want. For a simple scarf, mitts, or dishrag, I would go with a pre-dyed skein.

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