To my knitters: How do I do what's in this picture? (and some other questions).

well i started it with 30, since no one answered for a whole hour. sheesh, what is it, do you guys have lives outside of fluther or something? come on, get with the program here! but then i realized there there’s no “inside” and “outside” that way. it’s just like, striped, and i realized that right after i dropped a stitch and for some reason couldn’t figure out how to get it back, so then i just took the whole thing out. but i swear that’s the only time i’m doing that for this piece. really.

@La Chica; This is really hard to explain but really easy to show. Do you have a friend or relative who knits or a yarn store near you with an instructor on board? I can’t begin to articulate how you would switch colors, but could show you in a jiffy.

tali said i just need to tie them together. (i talked to her in the chatroom after asking the question) is this a different method?
also, thank you for answering my question! i’ve been hanging around fluther for about an hour hoping someone would!!

It is better to carry the yarn from color # 1 on the back side when you knit with color # 2. You can cut it after you have knitted 4 or 5 stitches and then crochet the end in on the back side. This does really sound like gibberish. Pros never tie ends together. Sorry.

Yes!!! I knew it! When I asked her, I said something like, “And don’t tell me you just tie them together. That would be so plebeian.” No really I did. You can ask her.

Also what if there’s no back – as in a scarf?

Oh, dear. The only way around that is to make your stripes horizontal, sew a design on afterwards with a needle, wool and the knitting stitch or line it. Don’t you have a granny or aunt around who knits?

no, my grannies are dead, and my aunts (the not-dead ones) are 1000 miles away, and i don’t think they knit. it’s no big deal though. i mostly taught myself using youtube. i’m sure i’ll figure it out soon enough.

If you’re using actual wool yarn that felts, here’s my favorite join. You can use this when you change colors, or when you run out of yarn and need to join another skein. However, it only works for wool and other animal fibers that felt together.

Felting is when the fibers become all hooked together individually, because wool, like hair, has scales on the surface that (microscopically) hook together something like velcro. This is what happens when you accidentally wash a good wool sweater and shrink it to a size 1, but it’s useful if done on purpose. Things that cause felting are heat, agitation, and moisture, so this is what to use.

Anyway. Take the old end and the new end that you want to attach together. Slightly moisten them – if no one is looking, you can even use saliva! :) Then, lay them together (overlapped for a couple inches) and hold them between your palms, like a sandwich (your palms are the bread). Now, rapidly move your hands back and forth (like you do when you’re cold) – this generates the heat and agitation, that when combined with the moisture, felt the ends of yarn together. Try pulling on the pieces and see if they come apart – if they still separate, then either you need to do it again or they’re not the kind of wool that felts. (If you’re using really thick yarn, you might want to remove a ply or two from each end, so that when you felt them together it’s still only as thick in total as one strand, not two.)

If you want to see a video, go here and scroll down for “felted join.”

The benefit is that it’s a strong join, there’s no lumpy knot, and there’s no loose ends to weave in later. It’s my absolute favorite join. :)

Also, when I was a new knitter, I did just tie them together. There are other, better ways, but tying them is quick and it gets the job done. No one will throw you in jail for doing it.

When I am faced with yarn that doesn’t felt, and I need to join, I tie a very loose knot. Then, when I’m a few rows past that spot, I go back and untie it and weave in the ends. It’s cheating a little bit, but nobody knows and it works.

And yes, you can TOTALLY do 30 and 3×3. Knitting is something you can make up as you go along (especially for things like scarves) if you have the basics down about things like math. And since you use skinny yarn, adding those extra three stitches is a good idea. The easiest way to tell if you’re doing it right is to ask, (1) am I having fun?, and (2) do I like what the project looks like?—if you can answer yes to both, you’re doing it right. :)

laureth has some good advice there. The other thing I do is to actually change yarn as little as possible. You can start a second color and carry along the first color in the back of the work (you sort of twist it in every couple of rows without breaking it off) until you get to the big chuck of the second color. At that point you do whatever join you decide to do to finish off the first color and the second color is already worked into the pattern. This way you’re only really changing your yarn twice for this type of pattern instead of multiple times. You do have to watch your tension, though, so you aren’t making your yarn overly tight or overly loose when you carry it along in the back of your work. It takes some practice.

cyndyh, that sounds really cool. can you explain a little bit more the benefit of doing it this way? i’m a little confused about only having to change the yarn twice. thanks!

@cyndyh – That’s a good way to keep a color going when there’s a “back” to the work, but is there a good way to hide the strand in a scarf?

If a knitter is making only very short stripes, though, I’ve just dropped the color I’m not using and picked up the other color, letting the unused color hang at the side until needed again. If you’re doing a lot of two-row stripes, that might be the most efficient way.

Yeah, I do use that with a “back” in mind to the work. For things like scarves I tend to make tubes (and sew the end to flatten it at twice the thickness) so the inside is a “back” in a sense. But the technique isn’t limited to two row stripes. You can twist the first color back in every couple of rows and make sure you have left enough give in the work. That way you only really break off when your stripe is large large large.

For the picture in question, I’d carry both colors through the work until you have a large large stripe. So, you’re only weaving in the beginning of color 2 and the end of color 2. And if the color 2 stripe is really large a beginning and end of color 1. The casting on and off take care of color 1’s start and finish to the whole piece and you weave that in as you normally would for a one-color piece.

Leave a long tail any time you have to work something in (for a beginning or end of a color) because you can always cut more off but you can’t always create more tail to work with.

But, yeah, I would end up designating one side as a back to the work if I was going to do it this way. I’ve recently done a lot of “fair isles” patterns and those always have a “back” or an “inside”.

Ah, okay, that makes sense if you’re making scarves like tubes. I bet those are super warm! I’d be tempted to knit those in the round, I think – less purl, no sewing.

My friend, Kevin, is knitting a 4 stitch tube, using up his left-overs. He has about 5 miles of the tubing and will try to make an oval rug. There will then be the issue of getting it to not curl.

What about bobbins?

Well, less sewing anyway. I still would do something to flatten the ends. You can also use the thinner yarns (sports weight, fingering weight) and do more with pattern if you double up on the thickness like that.

gail, I had one of those little 4-stitch tube-maker things when I was a kid. Those are fun for a while, but the piecing together or sewing the whole tube to itself makes the rug-making part of things less and less fun as you go. The payoff is a diminishing return on the fun. But they tend not to curl once they’re pieced together.

@cyndyh: We are afraid that Kevin will wake up one morning and find himself engulfed in the tubing, like a boa or Audrey II.

Ha! If he does you should take a picture. Then get him safely untangled. :^>

I have no idea if you still need some info on this, but here goes:

—when you want to knit stripes, if you’re knitting flat (i.e. back and forth), stripes are easiest if there are an even number of rows of each color.
—you can carry your yarn along on edge of the scarf and it’s practically invisible. The best way to do this is to have yarn A (that you just finished knitting a row with) sitting on top of yarn B (that you want to start knitting with). This makes a half-twist of sorts. I would suggest doing this on every row so that you don’t get long ‘floats’.
—there’s also the issue of color jogs when knitting ribbing, but if you’re not noticing that, I won’t even begin to talk about that heartache.

I hope some of this was useful to you!

Wow, it’s been almost a year since I asked this question, and I think I just found my new favorite way to change colors / change yarns, so I figured I should report back. It’s called a Russian join, and I’m really excited to try it out! I’ll let you know!