IMHO, the best way to deal with ends is not to create any.
For working in yarns of the SAME color as you go, this LINK shows two different ideas:
1) "felting ends" also called "spit splicing."
2) Overlapping join
But, what if you're changing colors? A felted or overlapping join is out of the question, because you'll have color mismatch. A knot is a bad idea--a knot leaves a hard little nub, and very frequently, comes undone with wear.Today's post illustrates a technique called the Russian join, which is the classic solution for pre-working ends in multi-color knitting.
Step 1 (left) Make a loop in your yarn by threading the tail of the yarn onto a SHARP needle and running the tail into the standing yarn (standing yarn=yarn coming from the ball). If the yarn is plied, run the tail through the plies, if the yarn is unplied (also called one-ply) just run the tail through the fibers of the standing yarn.
Step 2 (right) Repeat with the second color, so as to make interlocking loops. Knit with the resulting yarn.
There you go: no ends.
However, although this is a BIG improvement over working in a scad of loose ends at the end of a project, there are several reasons why you might find the Russian join to be less-than-ideal.
- It is hard to get the join just where it ought to be--any imprecision in making the joint might give you a green stitch where you mean to have a pink one.
- Stopping and hunting out a sewing needle and sewing in ends is slow--the rhythm of the knitting gets disrupted.
- Because the tail is worked into the standing yarn BEFORE knitting, it's hard to control where it will end up.
- Unraveling (frogging) is dicey--the bits of yarn are so precisely calibrated lengthwise that there is no extra slack for correcting an error.
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PS: Here is a link to a post with 10 (!) different methods of working in ends in knitting, eight of which are "as you go."
--TECHknitter
(You have been reading TECHknitting on: The Russian join)