I am knitting my first pair of striped socks–the house socks from ‘Charmed Knits’. I don’t understand how to carry yarn at the beginning of the round when changing colors. Can anyone help me please?
Actually, I don’t know the answer to your question, but I do have an add-on to your question: if you do pick up the yarn at the beginning of each row, will that save you from having to weave in your ends?
Take a look at this pattern by the Yarn Harlot. She has some good tips in there for avoiding weaving in ends with stripes and for avoiding the “jog” when changing colours. Hope it helps.
To answer both of your questions (I think!)-- This is all so that you don’t have to cut and re-tie on the new color every time you change stripes. It makes that area extra thick if you do that, and you especially don’t want that in your socks-- uncomfortable! So instead, you just “carry” the yarn you’re not using. Every time you come to the end of a round, just wind the 2 colors together. So if you’re working on stripe A, every time you get to the end of a round, take the skein of B and wind it around A once, and then keep going with A. It will keep a big loop of the non-working yarn from forming. When you wind the 2 around each other don’t make it too tight or that part fo the sock will pucker there, and don’t have it so loose that you get noticeable loops, either. You’ll get a feel of how tightly/loosely to pull it. And just for clarification-- this is a different from carrying unused colors when you’re doing Fair Isle or other real color work. In those situations, you carry the unsued yarn along the entire row-- you don’t want to do that here! For your socks, when you’re working with color A, just leave color B alone EXCEPT for the ends of the rounds when you do your little twist.
brittyknits–thanks, that kind of explains it, I guess I won’t know until I actually get there, I’m still working the first color. When you say ‘wrap’ you would wrap the new color over the old color still on the needle before you start the first stitch on the next needle (I’m using DPN’s), then drop the old color, right? I may have to go to a LYS and get help to visualize this!
Yes, that’s pretty much it. You’re trying to avoid holes and long loops of yarn inside the sock. It may make more sense once you’re there, as you said, and also it may well be worth a quick trip to your LYS. It’ll take them all of 3 seconds to demonstrate this! It is hard to visualize, and having them show you real quick will with show you how to do it, or confirm you did it correctly:).