More Puzzling- Tweaking- and Stripes

A very satisfying stack of socklets

More tweaking of the socklet pattern has been going on. I decided to throw some stripes into the mix just to make it interesting. I searched YouTube for a video tutorial on jogless stripes. This is something I have never really bothered with before but…

When you knit circularly the stitches form a spiral so that the end of a row is actually above the beginning -so you get a little jog. You can decide to blithely ignore this or follow the jogless stripe technique and get rid of the jog.  Check out this video by Eunny Jang- even if you already know how to do a jogless stripe check it out. I’ve never seen anyone knit that fast- it’s incredible.

OK if you sat through the video you saw that towards the end Eunny also demonstrates a “Barber Pole” technique. Knitting humbles me. It seems there’s a never-ending stream of new things I’ve never even imagined. I decided to give it a go. I added a new color on each of my three needles then knit with one color till I got to the next, dropped the old one and picked up the next color…and on and on. With the first socklet- the one on the left below- I thought I needed to somehow keep the yarns spaced evenly and so at one point gradually shifted the exchange over. This just left a slanted "scar". Turns out you don't need to do that. Just trust you will be jog free. See no jogs in the socklet on the right. (except one round where I missed a yarn exchange) 

Keeping the yarn from tangling could be a bit of a chore. I kept from having to juggle three balls of yarn because I was using Brownsheep ”Wildfoote”  which comes in pull skeins. They behaved very nicely there next to me on the couch. (note my knitting doesn’t always coordinate very well with my upholstery) With the skeins lying like this I was able to pass the needed color from the end of the row of skeins to the beginning, under my working yarn. No tangles. Not sure that I would want these stripes in my bag as a to-go project.

There is a slight ridge where the exchange of yarns happened which must be a tension issue. I'm thinking it may block out with a few wearings and washings. In the end- striped socklets that fit  - Yeah!