Knitting stripes in the round may present two challenges: tons of tails to weave in (yuck!) and a slightly unseemly “jog” (or half-step) at the color change. Our Stripes In The Round Tutorial addresses both issues, first with our Carrying Up The Yarn Tutorial, which explains how to knit stripes without cutting the yarn at the end of each stripe, and second with our Jogless Stripes Tutorial, which shows how to knit stripes with a smooth transition at the color change. Let’s do it!

Carrying Up The Yarn Tutorial

When you’re working fairly thin stripes in the round, you’ll probably want to “carry” the yarns up the wrong side of the work instead of cutting them at the end of each stripe. This avoids a lot of loose ends to weave in! This technique only works if the distance from the new stripe to the last time you used that yarn is relatively short. Keeping floats to less than an inch is a good rule of thumb.

Click To See Video Transcript

Hey, this is Laura from Purl Soho, and today I’m going to talk to you about some tips and tricks for knitting stripes in the round. This swatch is round, knit in the round. It looks kind of flat here, but as you can see, this is single-row stripes. Now, if you’re working in multiple rounds of a single color and then you’re switching to multiple rounds of a single color, you may want to check out our Jogless Stripes Tutorial. But for now, in this video, we’re going to focus on how to carry the yarn up when you get to the end of the round, and how to create this beautiful kind of faux seam. 

Okay, so let’s carry some yarn up while we’re knitting in the round with stripes. As you can see, I just finished working in this white color, and I want to knit the next round in this dark color. But the question is, what do you do at this transition point? At the end of the round, I’m going to show you. So what you want to do is take the yarn that you just worked with, the yarn you previously worked with, and cross it over the yarn you’re about to work with. I want the yarn I’m about to work with behind the old yarn because I want to use it to kind of cinch or trap the old yarn between the new round and this fabric. Once you have your two strands of yarn oriented, you can just begin knitting. One tip I will mention is that I want you to fight the urge to knit this first stitch too tightly, just knit as you normally would. I’m going to take a couple stitches here, and then I’m going to show you what this transition does to the fabric on the inside. 

So lemme get these strands out of the way here. If you look on the inside of this swatch, you’ll see that if you cross your previously worked yarn and your about-to-work yarn, as I showed you, you have this really beautiful line on the inside of your fabric, and it also keeps that end of round secure, not too tight, not too loose, and there’s no holes or anything. So anyway, those are our tips and tricks for working stripes in the round.

Jogless Stripes Tutorial

Because knitting in the round is essentially a spiral of stitches, changing colors for stripes creates a “jog” or a vertical column of staggered lines. Lots of people accept this as the natural outcome of hand knitting, but if it bothers you, there’s a way around it! Check it out…

Click To See Video Transcript

Hey, this is Laura from Purl Soho and today I’m going to talk to you about jogless stripes. Oftentimes when you knit stripes in the round, this swatch is actually round. Don’t be fold, it’s not flat. The stripes don’t perfectly line up. There’s this jog that occurs and that’s because when you knit in the round, you’re really creating this very subtle spiral. So when you get to the end of the round, it’s slightly higher than the beginning of the round, but there’s a technique that solves this problem and it creates this more fluid or continuous stripe and really minimizes that jog that can happen. So yeah, let’s get into it. 

Okay, so I’ve just completed my third round in this contrast color and I’m ready to begin knitting in my main color for this first step, all I’m going to show you is how to carry up your yarn. So what I want to do is take the yarn I just worked with, I previously worked with yarn and cross it in front of the yarn I’m about to work with. This just kind of traps this yarn between the new yarn and the fabric and the rounds we’re about to knit, carrying it up the inside of the swatch and then just knit around normally, and then we’ll move on to the next step. 

Alright, so just completed my first round in the main color and now I’m going to show you how to transition to the second round. This is where you accomplish that jogless stripe. So this round, the way you carry up the yarn is slightly different. So first I’m going to take the yarn I just worked with and cross it in front of the contrast color, same as we did last round, but this time I’m going to bring it back around the back. So if you can see there, it’s like a full twist of this full twist happening. Then once I’ve done that, then I’m going to slip the first stitch of the round purlwise. So inserting my needle from back to front as if to purl, slipping it off the left needle onto the right needle. And now I’m going to continue on knitting this round as normally, as I normally would. So just going to knit the whole round. 

Alright, so I have just completed my second round in my main color and I’m doing a three-round by three-round stripes. I’m ready to jump into my third round, for a third-round stripe. I would just go straight into it and start knitting. Now if this was a fourth or fifth round, I would double cross my yarn again like I showed you for round two, just to carry that contrast yarn up. But as with everything, with knitting, it’s knitter choice. But for my third row, I’m going to just jump right in and begin knitting and I’ll just knit this round as I normally would. One thing I do want to point out though is just these stripes. Again, the reason we’re able to avoid the jog that’s happening down here is because of this jogless striped technique. And you can see that very first column of stitches, the very first column of the row, because we slipped that second round, it only has two stitches, whereas the column next to it has 1, 2, 3 stitches. So this technique is really great when you’re working it in stripes of three or more rounds. You can use it for a two-by-two round. Just depends on, again, knitters choice, but that’s it. That’s how you do jogless stripes.

Give It A Try

Stripes in the Round | Purl Soho

Put your new knowledge to work with our stripey free Keyhole Scarf pattern in Cashmere Merino Bloom, also available as a Keyhole Scarf Kit!

Stripes in the Round | Purl Soho

Our free Fun Stripes Socks pattern gives you lots of stripes-in-the-round practice and are a total joy to knit in our super soft Fine Print sock yarn!

Looking for more inspiration? Explore all of our free knitting patterns and knitting tutorials, buy one of our many knitting kits and yarn bundles, and shop for beautiful yarn. We have over 35 gorgeous natural fiber yarns in 100’s of magnificent colors, designed to bring integrity, beauty, and joy to your next knitting project and only available at Purl Soho!