Shadow knitting (or illusion knitting, as it’s better known) is ridiculously addicting. What is it, you ask? Here, I’ll show you:
First, you pick out two contrasting colors. For this project, I used maroon and light gray. With those two colors, you knit up a striped stocking stitch pattern with a twist. Each time you get to the color you want to use as the background color (that’ll make more sense in a minute, I promise!), you purl the right side row instead of the usual knit.
Now comes the fun part. Any purl stitches are going to stand out. See here how there are spots where the red stitches stand out more than the gray stitches? That’s done by purling those red stitches, and knitting the grey stitches in the row below. When you look at the piece straight-on, it’ll just look like regular stripes. But when you look at it from an angle, you’ll see the “shadows” from the shapes you’re creating with switching up the knits and purls. Pretty neat, huh?
In my next post, I’ll show you how to put together a shadow knitting design!