Is it normal for colorwork to look wonky after 6 months of picking it up and putting it down?

That tightening is super common with carried floats, and the good news is it's not some fatal error you made back in spring. Tapestry crochet carries the unused yarn inside the stitches, and almost everyone instinctively pulls the working yarn a bit snug to hide the carried strand. Do that over a whole motif and the fabric pulls in and bunches. It's a tension habit, not a structural mistake. The fix going forward is deliberately loosening up. Two things that helped me: spread the stitches apart on your hook before completing each one in the colorwork sections, so the carried strand has room to sit flat instead of cinching. And every few rounds, give the panel a firm widthwise stretch with your hands. If it springs back narrow, frog a few stitches and redo them looser. Some people go up a hook size for the colorwork rows only, which sounds odd but works because the carried yarn takes up space inside each stitch.

As for the panels alredy done, don't despair. If the bunching is mild, a proper wet block after assembly evens out a surprising amount. Soak the panels, pin them to the pattern's finished measurements, let them dry completly. The fabric relaxes and the tight sections stop pulling in so visibly. If one panel is genuinely narrower than the others, you've got options that don't involve six months of frogging. Adding a plain border row or two brings a short panel up to size, and on a cardigan a small difference at the side seams is way more forgivable than it would be on a pullover. For this last panel, hold it up against a finished one every few rounds and compare width at the same row count. Catching the drift early is much easier than fixing it at the end. And honestly, slight variation between sections is just part of handmade colorwork. Once it's blocked and worn, it reads as texture, not a mistake.

I've seen this happen with diferent yarn types too. Sometimes it's not the tension that's the main issue, but the structure of the fiber itself. If you're using a super fuzzy or highly plied yarn, it naturally has more bulk, and when you're carrying those long floats, the stitch can't settle as flat. I usally switch to a smoother, single-ply yarn for the colorwork to see if that helps. It makes a huge difference in how much it bunches up when you're knitting those dense motifs.

I think the issue is often the height of the stitch itself rather than just the tightness. Because the colorwork yarn is already thick, using a large stitch can just cause excess bulk to build up too quickly. I've found that dropping the row stitch height to about 2.5mm for those colored sections makes a huge difference. At my local studio, we often find that the gauge shifts by nearly 15% between the main fabric and the colorwork panels, so planning for that expansion during the drawing phase is critical.

I think stretching it out is definitely the right move for these types of projects. When I was working on a shawl, I found that checking the width was key. I used a ruler across the panel every ten rows to see exactly where the pulling started. It allowed me to adjust the hook size manually til the section matched the target width. That consistency makes a huge difference in the final drape.