Capturing Floats in Knitted Colorwork
Mary Beth Temple
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Description
When you are knitting certain styles of knitted colorwork you will wind up with floats. Floats are the strands of an unused yarn color that travel behind stitchs of another color, on the wrong side of the work. The longer the float, however, the more likely it is to droop in the back, maybe getting caught on your finger or a button, pulling the stitches out of shape.
To remedy that you can capture long floats by adding a simple twist at the midway point, keeping to the orientation you have established in your yarn management (new under old, for example). This way instead of one long float you have created two shorter ones. These captured floats also block nicely because there is a little bit of possible movement if your twist your yarns correctly.
This video on Stranded Colorwork Technique can tell you a lot more about knitting intarsia, by working on a stranded beanie hat.