Permafrost Pattern by Jared Flood: A Complete Knitter’s Guide

There are certain knitting patterns that transcend their instructions and become something closer to an event — a design so compelling that knitters talk about it in hushed, reverential tones, the way people talk about a book they can’t stop recommending or a meal they still think about years later. The Permafrost pattern by Jared Flood is exactly that kind of design. Whether you’ve been knitting for two decades or you’re still building your confidence with two-color work, Permafrost has a way of drawing you in and refusing to let go.

This guide covers everything you need to know before casting on: the designer behind the pattern, what makes Permafrost so visually striking, the technical skills you’ll need, yarn suggestions, tips for getting gauge, and the kind of advice that only comes from knitters who’ve already worked their way through every row. By the end, you’ll know whether this pattern belongs in your queue — and if it does, you’ll be set up for success from the very first stitch.

Who Is Jared Flood?

Jared Flood is one of the most respected names in contemporary knitting design. Based in New York City, he’s the founder of Brooklyn Tweed, an American wool company that sources its fiber from Rambouillet sheep raised in the American West and spins it into yarn that has become synonymous with a certain kind of modern, architectural knitting aesthetic. Brooklyn Tweed’s yarns are known for their halo, their warmth, their slightly rustic texture, and their stunning ability to show off stitch definition.

Flood’s design sensibility is rooted in both tradition and innovation. He draws heavily from Scandinavian and Fair Isle knitting traditions, but his patterns never feel like reproductions. They feel like reinterpretations — designs that understand where they come from and know exactly where they’re going. His work tends toward clean geometry, rich colorwork, and constructions that reward careful attention. Permafrost is a perfect example of all of these qualities.

Over the years, Flood has developed a devoted following among knitters who value quality, thoughtfulness, and patterns that make you feel like you’re participating in something larger than a simple craft project. Permafrost fits squarely within that legacy.

What Is the Permafrost Pattern?

Permafrost is a stranded colorwork yoke sweater, and if you’ve spent any time in the knitting world, you already know that stranded colorwork yoke sweaters occupy a very special place in the collective knitting imagination. This is the silhouette that many knitters dream of mastering — a seamless, top-down or bottom-up construction with a showstopping band of colorwork sitting right at the yoke, radiating outward from the neckline like something that belongs in a museum of Nordic textile art.

Flood’s Permafrost design features a complex and deeply satisfying colorwork motif. The patterning draws on traditional Nordic and Scandinavian influences, using geometric snowflake-like forms arranged in concentric bands that create a sense of depth and movement. When knit in carefully chosen contrasting colors, the yoke becomes the focal point of the entire garment — the kind of thing that makes people stop you on the street to ask where you got your sweater, and the kind of thing that gives you enormous satisfaction when you get to say you made it yourself.

The body of the sweater is typically worked in a simple, elegant stockinette or subtle textured pattern that allows the yoke to command full attention. The overall silhouette is flattering and wearable — this is a garment you’ll actually reach for, not one that lives folded in a drawer because it’s too precious or too complicated to wear.

The Appeal of Stranded Colorwork Yoke Sweaters

Before going further into the specifics of Permafrost, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate why this category of sweater has such enduring appeal. Stranded colorwork — also called Fair Isle or two-color knitting, though purists will note these aren’t exactly interchangeable terms — involves working with two or more colors of yarn simultaneously, creating patterns by alternating which color you’re working with across a row while carrying the unused yarn along the back of the fabric.

The result is a fabric that is denser and warmer than single-color knitting, thanks to those carried floats on the wrong side. This makes colorwork sweaters exceptionally practical for cold weather, not just beautiful. There’s a reason this technique developed in places like the Shetland Islands and Scandinavia, where warmth wasn’t optional.

The yoke construction — whether top-down or bottom-up — concentrates all of that colorwork in the upper portion of the sweater. This is brilliant from a design standpoint because the yoke is what frames your face and commands attention when you’re wearing the garment. It’s also brilliant from a knitter’s standpoint because you’re not committing to working colorwork across the entire body of the sweater, which would be exhausting. You get maximum visual impact for a more contained effort.

Permafrost takes all of this and executes it at the highest possible level.

Yarn Choices for Permafrost

Naturally, Jared Flood designed Permafrost with Brooklyn Tweed yarns in mind, and for good reason. The recommended yarn is typically Brooklyn Tweed Shelter or Loft, both of which are spun from that American Rambouillet wool and have properties that make them exceptional for colorwork.

Brooklyn Tweed Shelter is a worsted-weight yarn with a lovely rustic character. It has wonderful stitch definition, meaning your colorwork motifs will read clearly and crisply against each other. It’s also slightly woolly in texture, which helps the floats on the wrong side of your fabric stay relaxed and prevents the common colorwork problem of puckered or tight fabric. The yarn blooms slightly after washing and blocking, which softens the overall look in a way that’s very flattering.

Brooklyn Tweed Loft is a lighter-weight yarn — a laceweight or light fingering — that creates a drapier, airier fabric. If you prefer a sweater with a bit more flow and less bulk, Loft is worth considering. It requires more stitches to achieve the same dimensions, which means more rows of colorwork, but the finished fabric has a beautiful delicacy.

That said, you don’t have to use Brooklyn Tweed yarns to make a stunning Permafrost. What you’re looking for in a substitute is a wool or wool-blend yarn with good stitch definition, elasticity, and the ability to “grip” itself slightly so that your floats don’t slide around. Yarns with a bit of natural lanolin or those with a slightly woolen (as opposed to worsted) spin are ideal. Some knitters have used Istex Léttlopi with beautiful results, embracing the Icelandic wool’s rustic character and excellent colorwork visibility. Others have used Drops Karisma or Cascade 220, both of which are reliable workhorses for colorwork projects.

Whatever yarn you choose, it’s essential that your main color and contrast color have sufficient contrast. Colorwork patterns depend on the eye being able to distinguish between the two (or more) colors clearly. This sounds obvious, but it’s easy to fall in love with a combination that looks striking in the skein but muddies together in actual stitches. A useful trick is to photograph your yarn options in black and white — if the values (lightness and darkness) are similar in the black-and-white photo, there’s not enough contrast.

Skills You’ll Need

Permafrost is not a beginner pattern, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. However, that doesn’t mean it’s out of reach if you’re an intermediate knitter who is ready to stretch yourself. Here’s an honest breakdown of the skills the pattern calls for.

You should be comfortable with knitting in the round. The seamless construction means you’ll be working on circular needles for most of the project, and you need to be able to manage long circular needles for the body and shorter ones (or magic loop technique) for sleeves.

You’ll need to work stranded colorwork — holding two yarns and working each stitch with the appropriate color while carrying the other yarn behind. There are different methods for holding your yarns: some knitters hold one in each hand (the so-called Continental method for one and the English or “throwing” method for the other), while others manage both yarns in one hand. Practice before you dive in. The goal is to maintain even tension and to keep your floats at the back loose enough that they don’t pull the fabric inward.

You should understand how to read a colorwork chart. Permafrost uses a grid-based chart where each square represents one stitch and the color of the square tells you which yarn to use. Reading across a row from right to left (as you would when knitting in the round) becomes second nature quickly, but it can be disorienting at first.

You’ll also need to be comfortable with short rows or yoke shaping, depending on the construction method, and with picking up stitches for sleeves if the pattern uses steeks or a separate sleeve construction.

Getting Gauge and Why It Matters More Than You Think

In colorwork knitting, gauge is not a suggestion. It is a requirement. This is because colorwork affects your gauge in ways that plain stockinette does not — most knitters find that their colorwork gauge is tighter than their plain gauge, sometimes significantly so. If you swatch in plain stockinette and cast on based on that, your sweater will likely come out smaller than expected.

Always swatch in colorwork, and always swatch in the round if that’s how the pattern is worked (which it almost certainly is). A flat swatch and a circular swatch can produce different gauges even with the same needles and the same yarn, because most people throw tension differently when purling versus knitting. Knitting a small tube to check your gauge is the most reliable method.

Wash and block your swatch before measuring. Wool in particular can change significantly after washing — it may relax and grow, or it may felt slightly and tighten. You need to know what your yarn is going to do before you’ve committed dozens of hours to a project.

If your swatch is too tight (more stitches per inch than the pattern calls for), go up a needle size. If it’s too loose, go down. Don’t be surprised if you end up two or even three needle sizes away from what you’d expect for the yarn weight — this is common in colorwork.

Tips for Beautiful Colorwork

A few practical points that will make your Permafrost considerably more enjoyable to knit and considerably more beautiful to wear.

Managing your floats is probably the single most important technical skill to focus on. A float is the strand of yarn that runs across the back of the fabric when you’re not using it for several stitches in a row. If that float is too tight, it will pull the fabric and create puckering. The trick is to spread your working stitches on the right needle before laying down a float, giving the float a bit of extra length. With practice this becomes automatic.

Pay attention to yarn dominance. In two-color knitting, one yarn will consistently appear slightly more prominent than the other based on which hand you hold it in or which position it hangs from. This is called yarn dominance, and it affects the appearance of your colorwork more than most knitters realize. Decide which color should be dominant (usually the one that forms the main motif) and hold it consistently in the position that gives it dominance throughout the project.

Use stitch markers generously to mark pattern repeats. When you’re working a 16-stitch repeat across 240 stitches, a misplaced yarn strand or an inadvertent extra stitch can throw off the entire round. Markers let you catch errors before they become a problem.

And finally: be patient with yourself. Colorwork has a learning curve. Your tension will probably be inconsistent at the beginning and smooth out as you go. This is normal. Block your finished sweater, because blocking is genuinely transformative for colorwork — it evens out tension variations and makes the finished fabric look professional even if the knitting process was a bit uneven.

Finding the Pattern

Permafrost by Jared Flood is available through Brooklyn Tweed’s official website and through Ravelry, the online hub for the global knitting and crocheting community. On Ravelry, you can browse project pages from other knitters who’ve made Permafrost, which is enormously valuable — you can see the pattern worked in different yarn combinations, different colorways, and different sizes, and you can read notes from knitters about their experience with the pattern, including any modifications they made.

The Ravelry project pages for a popular pattern like Permafrost are essentially a crowdsourced guide to making the pattern your own. Pay attention to comments about sizing — colorwork yoke sweaters sometimes have unique fitting considerations, and other knitters’ notes can save you from going down a frustrating path.

Why Permafrost Is Worth the Effort

In a world full of quick-knit patterns and instant-gratification projects, Permafrost sits at a different end of the spectrum. This is not a sweater you’ll finish in a weekend. It’s a project that will live with you for weeks or possibly months, one that you’ll carry in your bag and pick up in stolen moments, one that will teach you something every time you sit down with it.

That’s not a drawback. That’s the point. The best knitting projects are the ones that grow alongside you, that require something of you, and that leave you slightly more skilled when you cast off the final stitch. Permafrost is that kind of project.

When you wear it — and you will wear it, often — it will carry the memory of every choice you made: the colors you selected, the moment you figured out how to manage your floats, the satisfaction of seeing the snowflake motifs emerge from what was just a few minutes ago a tangled mass of yarn and intention. That’s not something you can buy. That’s something you make.

Permafrost by Jared Flood belongs in your queue. Put it there, gather your yarn, swatch carefully, and begin.