Monday, April 27, 2015

How to join a new skein of yarn in the middle of your work + a sneak peak at what's currently on my desk

Let me start by asking what's wrong with this picture?

Is it gone already?
You got it - I'm almost out of yarn and I'm in the middle of the row. How ANNOYING!!

As you can see I'm working on something new. A ripple blanket for a baby that is due in about two months. The pattern is from Attic24 and I love it. It's flowing and easy to follow and the photographed tutorial is absolutely wonderful.

Everything went well until I got to the off-white yarn. I started this part not with a new skein of yarn, but from a half used skein I had lying around (I mean, off-white color is always lying around in my studio, it's so useful!). And so, in the middle of my 6th row I noticed that I was going to run out of yarn. Lucky for me, I didn't have a problem with getting new skeins, because I have plenty of those, but I wasn't sure about the right way to introduce the new yarn into the work.

Since this problem occurred in the middle of the row I was scared of having to tie threads together in a bulky way and also was worried I'll have to weave the ends at such a visible location. I even considered ripping out the entire row until the beginning and attaching the new skein to the edge of the blanket. Lucky for me, I didn't!



Almost out of yarn in the middle of work
In my despair I turned for help to good old "Uncle Google" and in a blink of an eye found an excellent tutorial on how to introduce a new ball of yarn (same color or different one) in the middle of the work. You can find it over at eweewe yarns (you'll need to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the post, but it's there).

Now, take a look at my beautiful and neat solution:
Can you see that tiny little knot? Almost invisible!

A close up of the tiny little knot that saved my half done row.
See how tiny that little know is? It's almost invisible. Now I'm ready to continue working with my new skein.
Able to continue working now

And this is how it look after I continued that row. There's no telling where is that tiny meeting point of the two strands of yarn, is there??

Impossible to trace the meeting point
In the close up picture, you can see the tiny knot hidden well amongst the double crochet stitches and from the other side of the blanket you can't see it at all. This, for me, is a great success and what makes this method really great, because it gives my blanket a professional look even when attaching new skeins.
Can you see it?

And from the other side?
Hope this will help some of you the next time you'll find yourself in a problematic position to be out of yarn.
I will post pictures of the finished blanket once it's done, hopefully by the end of the week.

UPDATE: In case you were wondering, these method works great also for thicker yarn. Used the same method on another blanket I'm crocheting now and it was as easy as pie. See for yourself (More on this blanket - on another post):

Can you see the join?

Isn't that a neat little join of two strands of yarn?

You're also welcome to join my mailing list or like my facebook page.

Thanks for stopping by,
Shimrit




No comments :

Post a Comment