Don’t be Afraid of Knitting in the Round

Yarn Academy recently did a three-part series on knitting in the round, covering common fears about knitting in the round, challenging those fears with facts and providing additional benefits of knitting in the round.

Circular knitting is great because it produces seamless fabric that can be shaped to fit body parts, whether those parts are feet or heads or fingers. Sweaters at least seem to get done a lot faster when you don’t have a ton of finishing to do, and the knitting seems to go faster because a lot of the time you may just be knitting (if you’re making Stockinette Stitch).

There are some downsides to circular knitting. Stripes and other colorwork have jogs instead of making perfect lines (there are ways to minimize this). It’s difficult to work intarsia in the round. A full sweater can get heavy while you’re knitting it all in one piece.

But still, I think it’s great to know how to knit circularly, whether with a circular needle, on double-pointed needles, using one long circular (or two circulars) or even a tiny circumference circular. There are so many different ways to try you’re sure to find one that you like.

Do you have a favorite method of circular knitting? I’d love to hear about it!

Next Pattern:

I can’t resist a pattern that’s both useful and a little silly, and that’s exactly how I feel about the Rybka pouch pattern from the delightfully named Rat and Sea Witch.

I know you’re going to ask, because I did, too. Rybka means little fish in Polish. (And because you’re also probably going to ask, Rat and Sea Witch comes from people’s attempts to say the designer’s name, Ratasiewicz, which if you say it fast kind of sounds like rat and sea witch.)

It’s easy to make a little fish bag in different sizes to suit your needs. The pattern has specific instructions for an Airpods Pro case and a pencil case, but you could change the length easily to hold more stuff, and change the size in general by working with a different weight of yarn.

The pattern calls for sock yarn and mohair held together to make a fingering weight gauge, but you could try it with heavier yarn and see what size bag you end up with.

Whatever size you make it, this looks like a fun project for holding trinkets or everyday items. The mouth of the fish is the mouth of the bag, and it closes with a drawstring that is also the strap. I wonder, too, if you could make one of these with a small clasp frame that could be the fish’s mouth and then you could just work I cord straps that would attach to the sides of the fish.

I could also see stripes, or fish of different colors to use up your yarn leftovers. How about a sunglasses case with a little loop to attach to your bag? Once you start thinking about all the ways you could use a fish-shaped bag in your life, I think you’ll see that you probably need more than one.

If you make one of these I would love to know how it went!

You can grab a copy of the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Rat and Sea Witch]

Next Pattern:

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