Alternating Skeins When Knitting with Hand-Dyed Yarn

Working with hand-dyed yarn is a lot of fun, and it’s great for us to support independent yarn dyers when we can. But it can sometimes be tricky to use over the course of a full garment because of little differences in how the color appears from skein to skein. Sometimes when you change to working with a new skein of yarn it will be really obvious because the color is just slightly different, or if you’re working with a very colorful yarn sometimes you’ll get color pooling, where one color seems to always land in the same place in your knit fabric.

The best way to deal with these issues before they happen is to knit from two different skeins throughout, also known as alternating skeins. This breaks up the color from one row or round to the next, preventing pooling.

If you’re working with more of a solid or semi-solid color, you can choose to alternate skeins throughout, or just switch colors every round (every other row if you’re working flat) for maybe an inch (2.5 cm) or so when you’re about to run out of yarn so that the colors mix together visually and you don’t get that abrupt stripe.

Alternating skeins isn’t hard, but it can sound tricky if you’ve never tried it before. Elizabeth Smith Knits has a couple of good videos along with some tips on different methods for carrying the yarn up as you go, which I think generally is the part that confuses people, especially newer knitters (no, you do not have to cut the yarn after every row as you alternate skeins).

This is one of those things that sounds like such a little thing but it makes a big difference. If you’ve ever knit a project and had the colors pool in a weird way or gotten that line where you switched colors, you know it’s worth the little extra bit of time it takes to do this. And if you’ve never done that, starting out with this technique when you start working with hand-dyed yarn on larger projects will make your results a lot better without a lot of extra work.

Have you used alternating skeins in a project before? Or failed to and wished you had? I’d love to hear about it!

[Photo: Elizabeth Smith Knits]

Over the years I have shared a lot of pumpkin knitting patterns, and I’ve knit and crocheted a lot of pumpkins myself. But it feels like there are always more fun things to try with knit pumpkins, so this year I wanted to look a little more beyond basic stockinette or ribbed pumpkins and share some pumpkin patterns with cables, bobbles and colorwork.

In the cable collection we’ve got these cute little basic cable and ribbed pumpkins from Elly Bear Knits. There are two sizes that make a wide, flat pumpkin and a taller round pumpkin. Both are worked in the round as a tube that’s cinched top and bottom when you’re done, and they use bulky weight yarn.

Another cute cable pumpkin knitting pattern comes from Gray Bear Akswokrat. This one is knit flat and it looks like a chunky yarn but you could use other weights to make pumpkins of different sizes. This one also has an I-cord stem and uses yarn to cinch up the sections of the pumpkin, giving it a more natural look.

Add some bobbles to your pumpkins with this design from Autumn Shelter Makes. Also worked in the round in a tube, it features a repeating pattern of bobbles and uses yarn wrapped around the outside to make segments. This one looks like worsted weight yarn to me.

Of course there’s nothing that says your pumpkin has to be a single color, so let’s throw in some colorwork. I love the look of the Cozy Fall Pumpkin knitting pattern from South Stitch Girls. The little leather loop adds a rustic touch but you could also just add a stick. These pumpkins have five colorwork options and are worked in worsted weight yarn in the round.

There’s also the Autumn Fair Isle Trio pumpkins pattern from Equestriann Style, which has three different sizes of pumpkins with four colorwork designs. They are worked in super bulky yarn in the round and look good with high contrast or more muted color combinations.

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