Knitting

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Planned Pooling in Knitting Projects

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Play with planned pooling in your knitting.Self-striping, self-patterning, speckled and otherwise colored yarns are really popular right now, and the interesting thing about some of these yarns is that they can look quite different depending on the size needles you use, the gauge you’re getting, how many stitches you work per row or round or whether you are working flat or in the round.

I generally think of pooling — where a particular color lines up on different rows, making a blotch or pool of the same color on the knit fabric — as a bad thing, but you can do really cool things with pooling if you are intentional about it.

Marly Bird has been doing a lot lately with planned pooling in crochet, but the same kind of thing works in knitting, too.

Crafty Crusader wrote a post a while back about using planned pooling in a hat project, which pointed me to the Planned Pooling website. This site allows you to plug in colors and note how many stitches are worked in each color as well as how many stitches are in a row and whether it’s worked flat or in the round.

This allows you to see what a knit up swatch or garment would look like, and you can play with the numbers to get different effects.

It’s actually really fun to play with and makes me want to try my own planned pooling project soon.

Have you ever played with planned pooling or had something unintentionally cool come up when you worked with a self-striping yarn? I’d love to hear about it.

[Photo: Crafty Crusader.]

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Comments

  1. I have never done it, but think it is really cool, and I really like the picture you posted.

  2. I had a variegated teal cotton yarn from Hobby Lobby that I crocheted into a dishcloth using an extended single crochet stitch. It made an X on the dishcloth. I made 2 with that skein, which turned out the same. I couldn’t duplicate it later to save my life, but years later I found some planned pooling videos on youtube and yes, Marly Bird. I’ve not tried it with knitting yet, but would like to do that sometime, too.

Have you read?

Knit a Little Scarf Full of Luxury

I guess the trend of little scarves and bandanas isn’t going away, and there’s a good reason for that. These little projects are fast, and they’re good for beginners because of the low commitment and they make something that doesn’t necessarily look like a beginner made it. 

And when you can combine a simple pattern with some super luxurious yarn, it’s a little treat that even more experienced knitters can get behind. 

The Little Dot Bandana from Purl Soho (designed by Gianna Mueller) is a project like that. It’s a simple eyelet triangle, worked from the long side down to the point, so there’s a lot of decreasing happening but it’s a really easy project. 

It calls for a hank of silk yarn and one that’s silk mohair, which gives the project a fuzziness and a little bit of a silky glow. 

Of course you can use different yarn to get a different look. A linen yarn would be fun for a summer kerchief, or combine wool and mohair for a warm and cozy kerchief for cold mornings. 

The pattern comes in two sizes, so you can stitch up a kerchief or a simple triangle shawl. The stitch multiple is 8 plus 23 stitches, so you can use that to make a triangle of any size you like, or you can use a heavier weight of yarn to make a different size if you prefer. The two strands held together as called for in the pattern makes a sport weight gauge, so you could try DK or worsted for a bigger and warmer project if you want. 

This pattern is available for free from Purl Soho, or check out the pattern notes on Ravelry to find how other people made this project. 

And if you need more options for kerchiefs to knit, check out this collection of kerchief knitting patterns.

[Photo: Purl Soho]