Needle Felt Yarn Ends for a Seamless Join

One fun way to get rid of little bits of yarn and to work with them a little more easily in a project is to make a crazy ball or a magic ball of yarn.

These are balls of yarn made with little oddments that are joined to each other so that you can just keep on knitting and not have to think about where to change colors.

Joining the yarns together is usually done by just tying them together, or, if you want to be a little fancier, doing a Russian join to more seamlessly join two yarns together.

Diana at Closet Crafter has another idea that works for magic balls or any other time you want to join two pieces of yarn together without having an end to weave in: needle felting.

A needle felting tool has a bunch of needles on it that you punch into the fibers, which eventually melds them together. It’s sort of the manual version of the felted join, but it works on acrylics and blends as well (but not cotton, Diana reports).

Have you ever made a magic or crazy ball of yarn? I’d love to hear about it and what you used it for.

[Photo via Closet Crafter.]

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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