Ladderback Jacquard: Virtual Workshop with Amy Snell

DETAILS

Date:  Friday September 12, 2025

Time: Noon- 2 p.m. Eastern time

Location: Zoom—this is a virtual event, and it will be recorded to watch and re-watch for as long as you like.

Your order confirmation email will include:

• A PDF with the link to the Zoom session and other information
• A Ravelry coupon code to download the Bloomlings hat pattern
• A short homework assignment to complete before class 
• Amy’s handout 

What Is Ladderback Jacquard? 

If you didn’t know about ladderback jacquard, you’re not alone! Kay had been knitting intarsia and stranded colorwork for a lifetime before she heard of it in 2024—and it changed everything.

Suddenly projects with widely-spaced, non-repeating, or asymmetrical colorwork motifs (I’m looking at you, Junko Okamoto’s Bouquet Sweater) are easy and intuitive to work. And with ladderback jacquard, the knitted fabric is stretchy and smooth—no holes! no color peek-through!

Ladderback logic is easy to understand when you’ve got the knitting in your hands, but not so easy to explain. That’s where ladderback champion Amy Snell came in—she wrote two posts for MDK about ladderback jacquard:

The Answer to Everything That Bugs You About Colorwork

How to Work Ladderback Jacquard

Visual learners cried out for more, so we invited Amy to teach this virtual workshop. Thank goodness she said yes!

What We’ll Learn

Easy, seamless, and beautiful, the ladderback jacquard technique will improve the tension of your stranded and intarsia colorwork while allowing you to span much larger areas between color changes. A great alternative to “trapping” long floats, ladderback adds stretch to the knitted fabric while preventing the color not in use from showing through.  This technique can be applied to nearly any colorwork knitting project: intarsia or stranded, whether worked in the round or flat. You’re going to wonder how you ever lived without it.

Using the Bloomlings baby hat as our textbook, we’ll learn how to set up ladders, how to work them on subsequent rows, and how to close them off when we don’t need them any more.

We’ll also go over best practices for ladder placement and how to mark ladders on colorwork charts, so you can easily bring this technique into any colorwork pattern, whether designed for ladderback or not.

 

What to bring

This workshop does not include a kit—it’s BYO yarn.

Amy’s Bloomlings hat uses small amounts of worsted-weight yarn; it’s a fantastic stash-buster, or you can purchase yarn for your project separately from MDK. Our Atlas yarn works great for this design—Amy used it in her photography sample in shades Mallard, Tutu, and Natural.  See the pattern for yardage requirements for the size you’re knitting.

You will also need US size 7 circular needles with a 16-inch cable, and a stitch marker to mark for the beginning of the round.

Our Workshop Leader

Amy Snell is a knitting instructor and designer with an eye for the unusual or unusually captivating. She enjoys teaching techniques and stitch patterns that bring color, contrast, geometry, and texture into knitting in new or interesting ways.

Whether teaching locally in the San Francisco Bay area, virtually, or in-person for knitting guilds and events nationwide, Amy loves to help other knitters explore new techniques and expand the way they think about their knitting. Her goal is to make complex concepts approachable for all knitters, while sharing tips that improve your process whether you’ve been knitting for several weeks or several decades.

Amy’s work has appeared in numerous books and periodicals including Cast On, Interweave Knits, Knotions, I Love Knitting and numerous pattern collections. She frequently shares tips and tricks on her website, www.DeviousKnitter.com, and can be found as @DeviousKnitter on social media.