This is The Yarnist. The daily newsletter that makes you love knitting the same way Dolly Parton loves her Coat of Many Colors.
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Knitspiration
A stranded colorwork sweater in progress (via Wikimedia Commons)
🪢 5 Tools to Keep Your Colorwork From Tangling
A couple summers ago I was knitting a big stack of swatches for our Colorwork Knitting Weekend.
Most of them went fine.
The fair isle ones did not.
Every time I switched colors, my two strands of yarn wrapped around each other a little bit more.
A few rounds in, they looked less like two balls of yarn and more like a I had been braiding the hair of one of my daughters.
So I'd stop, dangle the swatch in the air, and let it spin until everything came undone.
Then knit a few more rounds.
Then do it all over again.
I was getting annoyed.
Even though I have plenty of experience dealing with unruly yarn, sometimes you need a little help keeping thing organized.
But like my 3 year old, the yarn doesn't always listen.
It likes to do it's own thing from time to time.
Most of it's rebelliousness comes down to three things.
Your strands twist. Every time you drop one color and pick up the other, they turn around each other. Do that a few hundred times and you've made a rope.
Your yarn runs away. Two balls rolling around in your lap means one of them always ends up under the couch.
Your yarn collapses. Center-pull balls get floppy near the end and turn into yarn barf. That's a recipe for tangles and knots.
None of that gets fixed with better technique.
It gets fixed by changing how you manage your yarn.
That's what today's picks are all about.
😍 Colorwork Accessories We Love
Some of these are simple, some of them are downright clever.
All of them make colorwork a little less fiddly.
The Colorwork Wheel V2.0 by Maeli Designs Get it @ Etsy
Holds up to 4 yarn cakes | 3D printed, spins on a bearing
Each cake sits on its own peg, and you turn the wheel to untwist your strands instead of your knitting. Made for stranded and fair isle, not intarsia.
Tonight at 11:59PM PT the price of Yarnist Insider goes up to $99 a year. But if you join before then you'll only pay $52 for as long as you're a member.
Benefits include our Colorwork Knitting Weekend, October 8 to 10, and all our live Fearless Knitters Workshops, starting October 24.
Plus early access to videos, bonus content, and member discounts.
Knitting is in some ways a language. It has fewer "letters" than the English alphabet, but some languages only have 2 letters. Which means with nothing but knits and purls you could embed coded messages in a scarf...
Deal of the Day
Vogue Knitting Colorwork Paper (37% Off)
Graph paper made for knitters. The boxes are drawn as little V-shaped stitches instead of squares, so your colorwork chart actually looks like your knitting.
Before you go...below you'll find a few ways we can work together, and other bits & bobs:
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