Hi! I’m Toni Lipe with Toni’s Design Studio. We’re talking about knitting gauge swatches for your project. Right now, we’re going to talked about joining new yarn. Most projects take more than one ball of yarn. And sometimes you might want to switch yarns to put in stripes or different design elements.
When you add a new yarn to your project—all right, right now, I’m knitting with this green color yarn and I want to add this blue. Most knitters say that you should never tie a knot in your yarn. You should simply grab the yarn in your left hand and just begin knitting with it.
Now you want to always start your new yarn whether it’s the same color or a different color at the beginning of the row, if you’re doing stripes. If you’re using the same yarn and joined in the same color in the middle of the garment. It’s going to show up and look very, very untidy.
So you always want to start your new yarn at the beginning of the row. Unless you’re doing entire show or some kind of as your card knitting where you’re trying to knit a picture or some other design in the sweater but a good roll of thumb, now see we’ve knitted that blue onto the white and it is a bit loose there but we’re going tighten that up in a little while.
We continue knitting, continue knitting in our new color and I’ll show you how I will take care of that in just a second. Once you’ve completed your garment and you have all of these lose ends hanging off because if changing yarns or colors, you’ll weave them in and we’re going to discuss weaving in yarns in just a little bit. But as you can see, we’ve completed a row of our new yarn a new color and our yarn is staying together. Now I’m going clip this one off. And later on, we’re going take this end in a tapestry needle and weave them in.
Now if you’re knitting and you need to switch colors in the middle of the row for a picture, what you need to do—I’ll knit to about the middle here and then I’ll grab my light colored yarn. You hold that in your left hand and what you want to do is to twist the yarns just like that. So that they’re a little bit crisscrossed and this white comes over the blue and you begin knitting again.
This crisscross will help eliminate any holes you may encounter as you switch the yarn over. So I’m going to continue knitting with the white and I’m going to knit and we’ll change the yarns again so you can see how I did that twist again. I’ve messed up a stitch, so a back track. Always correct your mistakes, otherwise you may never sweater.
All right and when you’ve complete your project or as you knit, you can put it down and snug up your yarns just to make sure it looks right. And so here we have a strip of the white and we’re knitting into the blue and I’m going to switch to the blue again. So I’m going to switch this over here and I’m crisscrossing my yarns and I just drop the stitch but picked it up again. And then I’ll start knitting with the blue.
Now in that one more row and I will to put it flat so you can see what we’ve done. Some people find it unnerving just to leave the threads hanging on the garment and they’ll put a little knot in it. And then at the end of the project, we’ll go back and take the knot out and then weave the ends in. That’s your personal preference.
All right so, here are our thread ends and our projects do look like that sometimes, the threads hanging everywhere especially when you’re working on pictures or stripes and your knitting. Next, we’re going to talk about weaving those ends in and finishing our project.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services