Double-sided knobbly

This uses rib stitch and two, or three, colours.

The problem with conventional mixtures of colour within a row is that the knitting has a distinct front and back, and the back can get quite messy. The technique described on this page avoids that. It produces an effect of the back of stocking stitch (the knobbly side) on both sides. It is a type of double knitting. It is the opposite technqiue to double-sided smooth. Like that, it uses rib stitch, but handles altering which side the wools are differently.

Two colours

All rows are knitted using two colours throughout the row. Knit rib stitch throughout, but don't swap the wools between the needle with each stitch (like double-sided smooth). If you are doing a block of colour, keep the wools on opposite sides. Only swap them between the needles if there is a change of colour. The knit stitch gives you the colour away from you, and the purl stitch gives you the colour fracing you (this is opposite to the double-sided smooth technique).

Because you don't constantly have to swap wools, this technique is easier to use.

Another pattern:

I found that you can stop the sides separating out by trwisting the woold round each other before starting the row.

The columns pattern is neat, but unfortunately the stripes does show the dotted effect that the wrong side of stocking stitch gives.

Three colours

Like the double-sided smooth technique, you can do three colours by hiding the colour not needed between the two sides. You do this by taking the unwanted colour between the needles for each stitch, so it's always the opposite side to whichever stitch you're doing (in front for kknit, and behind for purl). It had a different feel to the other technique, as there you take all woools between the needles for each stitch and choose the one to want, and here you only take the unwanted wool between the needles.

This pattern also show shows that one side doesn't have to look like the other side at all. You can't have the same wool showing on both sides (unless you have two balls of the same colour!) but you can still have interesting variants of pattern. In this example, the white wool doesn't get to the edge. It showed a tendency to lift from the surface of the knitting, but I stopped that after a couple of rows by twisting the white wool round one of the other wools. It would, of course, be possible to take the white wool right to the edge as hidden, twist it round another wool to lock it there, then bring it back, still hidden.