Duplicate stitch help

I am trying to complete a project that my mom began - I am a novice.
When adding the “Santa” and trees in duplicate stitch? How do I make it more solid appearing, without the background color showing through?

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Welcome to the forum!
One thing you can avoid is tightening up the sts. Let the duplicate yarn be a bit looser in each stitch and it will cover the background better.
So good of you to complete this project of your mom’s.

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Hello
What a cute Christmas knit!

It looks to me like you have missed some of the knit stitch legs (a knit is a V shape and each line of the V is called a leg \ / ) and in some places have entered the stitch in the wrong place for a full duplicate stitch (it makes the duplicate smaller, shorter, than the full knit stitch V or could make for 1 long leg and 1 regular leg). I’ve done this myself at times.

You could revisit a duplicate stitch tutorial, pictures or video, and ensure you are working every stitch and every leg, and this would also correct the places where you entered incorrectly. This would mean carefully pulling out the work you’ve done and redoing it.

Having said that, I really like the effect you’ve produced, the red showing through the tree gives it a texture of branches and peeping through past the branches to the back ground. You might want to leave it, it looks good.
It looks like you might have gone in the “wrong” place for instance on some of the santa white stripe stitches, making the stitches short, but the effect is excellent, the narrower band of white adds to the design.

Also, keep in mind that a certain amount of peeping is expected with duplicate stitch, it’s a hand crafted item and not expected to look machine made or totally “flat” colour. If a fully solid shape or stripe of colour was wanted then a different approach would be used, intarsia knitting so that the actual fabric is knit in the different colour and duplicate stitches are not added. And this is down to the pattern selected and the knitters choice, so in this case the duplicate stitch approach was selected and gives a certain feel and style to the project.

I think it looks great.

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Welcome.
I’ve not yet done duplicate stitch so this info is useful. I want to add an initial to Christmas socks I am knitting.

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Thank you so much for this!!!

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Good advice, I do tend to be very “tense”. I have taught myself to knit in order to complete this for my brother in law- my mom started it, then passed away- it’s truly a labour of love.

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That’s a lovely thing to do for your brother-in-law and in honor of your mother. It’s lovely as it is. Thank you for the background on this project.

Your brother in law will love it, what a great gift.