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Work a Pretty Edge on a Two-Color Project

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How to carry the non-working yarn and make a chained edge when you knit stripes.When I’m knitting a project in two colors with just a few rows of each color worked at a time, I like to carry the unused yarn up the side of the work rather than cutting the yarn and having all those extra ends to weave in.

I usually just do this by holding the non-working yarn at the back of the work and knitting the first stitch of the row such that the yarn is caught and sort of pulled up into the next row if that makes sense. (I’ll do a video soon to show you what I mean.)

This tip on working stripes from We Are Knitters also involves slipping the first stitch of each row to make a chained edge along the side. It’s super easy as long as you remember to do it, and those slipped stitches are perfect to work into if you need to pick up stitches along the sides of the project later.

I’m definitely going to give this a try. How do you carry yarn up the side of a project?

[Photo: We are Knitters.]

Comments

  1. I have just let it sort of hang. I like the idea of the chain edge along the side but need a video to understand it. My luck I’d end up with an unfinished stitch and the whole works would in-ravel.

  3. If it is going to be a raw edge, then I would do as you do, catching the unused strand at the end every time.

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]