I love knitting in the round for garments since it makes seaming pieces together later unnecessary! But I don’t love the jog created when knitting in the round with different colors. When you knit in the round, you are knitting in one long spiral. This means each round stacks above or below the next round depending on the construction of the piece you are knitting. When you switch colors on your rounds this becomes easily noticeable with a visible jog at the beginning of each round where a new color begins.
As always in knitting, you have options. You can leave it that way or you can pick one of several ways to mitigate the jog. Instead of reinventing the wheel on jogless stripes, I’ve gathered my three favorite resources for this and added some of my thoughts about each here.
First let’s take a look at some of my recent projects – two hats and the Be You tee sample garment.
In this first hat, I decided to leave the jogs and simply kept knitting round after round without using any technique to avoid the stair-step jog between color stripes.
In this second hat, I couldn’t decide which technique I like best. So, I tried several of them. (This is my hat and I’m completely fine with the hodgepodge of techniques!) For the purple, green, yellow, and pink stripes, I did the Purl Soho technique shared below. For the orange stripe, I did nothing…and I’m not quite sure what I did with that blue stripe.
This is the underarm of my Be You tee sample garment where the 6-stripe rainbow is placed. Here I did the Craftsy or the VeryPink Knits technique that I share below.
Now that I’ve shared a look at how the different techniques worked for me. In no particular order, here are my three favorite resources that I wanted to share with you:
Craftsy has a great photo tutorial with clear pictures of one technique. In this technique you knit one round in the second color, then on the first stitch of the new round, you pull the first color stitch below up and knit it together with your second stitch. This creates a line of elongated stitches at the beginning of each row and hides the jog. Here is a link – https://www.craftsy.com/post/knitting-jogless-stripes-in-the-round/
VeryPink Knits has a great video tutorial on this same process. One thing I would note here is that I do not tie a knot when I switch colors as she does. I do add a twist to carry up the yarn when needed to help anchor the yarns together. But I’ve always worried that a knot would feel wrong while wearing the finished piece.
For a slightly different technique, Purl Soho’s video tutorial is also great. In this technique you knit one round in the second color, then on the first stitch of the new round, you slip the first stitch purlwise and then continue knitting around. The Purl Soho video is for a 3-round stripe but you can do the same technique on a 2-round stripe like for the Be You tee. In this video, they also talk a bit about how to add the twists I mentioned above to carry up the yarn.
And finally, I’m also going to point out that this process can be messy! When you add color stripes to a piece of knitting, you add multiple loose ends that need to be woven in during finishing and have a chance to do their loose strand things while you knit each round. Securely sewing in your ends during finishing is a must. After that, washing/blocking will help stitches set and fill out in a way that will make for a much tidier finished piece.
