This week, Kirsten Hipsky, the WEBS Design Manager, has some great suggestions for selecting the perfect color combinations for your next project!

Are you dying to knit the Campfire Pullover but want to try a different colorway? There are lots options!

For all of these combinations, we recommend using the darker color as the main color with the lighter color as the accent, but feel free to swatch the other way around, too. If you’re feeling super adventurous, you could even try reversing the colors on the yoke.

Thanks to Kirsten Hipsky, the WEBS Desgin Manager for contributing today’s tip! 

The Knit Stars pattern on the cover of our Holiday Catalog are quick and fun to make, but they can be a little tricky to start! To make the stars, you cast on and join 5 stitches in the round. It can be fiddly to join such a few number of stitches, so here are some suggestions to make the process go a little more smoothly.

There are lots of different ways to join those first 5 stitches in the round. You could distribute them among 3 or 4 double pointed needles, one magic-looped circular needle, or even work them like an I-cord for a couple rounds until you’ve increased to more stitches.

Or, if you’d rather work the whole project in rows (flat), you can do that - just cast on one extra stitch at the beginning and end of the row for seaming and purl the WS rows. You’ll just have a little more seaming to do at the end.

This week’s tip is from Kirsten Hipsky, the WEBS Design Manager. She fills us in on one of her favorite designing resources!

What’s a crafting tool that’s thin, light weight, portable, and lets you see what your knitting or crochet will look like BEFORE you even touch your yarn? A good piece of graph paper!

You can sometimes find a limited selection of it in the stationery section of office supply stores, but what if you want smaller, bigger, or clearer grids than what they sell? What if you want a rectangular grid that represents your actual stitch and row gauge? And what if you want to arrange triangular or hexagonal motifs?

http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ is a free online source for a large variety of graph paper that you can generate to your exact specifications and print out yourself. I’ve used it for years for charting my stitch patterns and sweater shaping, and it’s saved me a lot of time and aggravation. I’ve even printed out multiple pages and stapled them into a booklet for when I’m travelling.

When knitting stripes in the round, a jog is created at the color changes (bottom arrow). This is because knitting in the round is actually knitting in a spiral. One row is not neatly stacked on top of the other, but instead a spiraling continuation of the previous row.

To avoid the jog created by changing colors during striping:

1. Knit a row of your new color normally

2. On the next round, slip the first stitch of the round as if to purl, then continue knitting normally. This slipped stitch is elongated and pulls the entire row up higher to hide the jog created when changing colors.

The top arrow shows a stripe created using the slipped stitch method. The slipped stitch blends in with the other stitches for an almost invisible join.

Ysolda Teague’s book Little Red in the City offers fantastic tips on knitting, including how to get the perfect fit for a woman. If you’re going to spend the countless hours it takes to make a fitted garment, you want to make sure it really does fit in the end! On the right, you’ll see just where to put the tape measure for most of your measurements. You’ll get the most accurate information if you’re wearing the same undergarments you’ll wear under your knitted project, and it’s absolutely necessary to have a friend help you. You can’t get accurate measurements if you’re trying to do them yourself!

Where to measure from top to bottom:

High Bust
Bust
Under Bust
Waist
High Hip
Low Hip
Upper Arm
Wrist

You also want to measure: straight between your shoulder bones, across your back, your back neck to waist, waist to hem, and measure your arm for your sleeve length starting at your shoulder and measuring down to your wrist. You can check our Ysolda’s book, Little Red in the City for a really in depth explanation and schematics.

Ok, I know we’ve all heard this before; “Take time to save time, check your gauge!” 

Even though we all know we should, so many of us decide to go ahead with our project anyway throwing caution and common sense to the wind. I never knit gauge swatches either, assuming I would get gauge and cautiously sticking to patterns where gauge didn’t really matter. When my co-workers and I decided to knit a blanket for our friend getting married, gauge reared its ugly head. My square was so much smaller and almost roundish compared to my co-workers. While my square was small and tight, Tina’s square was huge and drapey. I ended up knitting the same squares as everyone else on a needle 3 sizes bigger. Tina had to go down two needle sizes to get the same gauge. We’re both experienced knitters, but the way we knit produced very different fabric.

Tina and I knit the same swatch, on the same needle size, with the same yarn to illustrate this point. My swatch is miniature compared to hers! The point of all this is, if Tina designed a pattern, and I attempted to knit that pattern without doing a gauge swatch, my project would be way too small. We’ve all heard knitter’s say, “I always get gauge”, but what if I designed a pattern? My gauge is obviously much smaller than most knitters, so you definitely wouldn’t automatically get gauge on my pattern.

The moral of the story is, do a gauge swatch every time!

This week’s tip coms from Ysolda Teague’s latest book, Little Red in the City. It’s filled with fantastic tips and tricks to making your knitting neater and easier resulting in a stunning finished product.

Uneven tension in your knitting results in sloppy looking stitches that can really distract from your stitch pattern and your overall project. This tension problem can be really obvious in ribbing. A lot of people purl looser than they knit. This makes the preceding knit stitch appear sloppy and uneven since any slackness in your purl stitch is actually traveling backwards to your knit stitch.

To fix this, work all purl stitches in Eastern style. The difference between Eastern and Western style is simply the direction in which the yarn is wrapped around the needle when working the stitch. Most people knit Western style, which wraps the purl stitches counter clockwise. Eastern purls stitches clockwise. The yarn can be held in either the left or right hand. Wrapping the yarn clockwise follows a shorter path around the needle, putting less yarn into the stitch. On the following row, knit into the back loop of your knit stitches.

Thanks to our Purchasing Coordinator and part-time knitwear designer, Emma Welford for this week’s tip!

If you hate purling and dread seaming or just want to challenge yourself with a different construction, try converting your flat pattern to knitting in the round! I’m currently doing this with my Holla Back Tank pattern since I’ve already knit the pattern once and want to keep myself on my toes this time around.

- Remove any ‘balancing’ stitches outside of the repeats for a lace or cable pattern.

- If your pattern calls for sleeves, you could knit them flat and seam them as originally called for.  Another option is to pick up stitches from the armhole and work a short row sleeve cap, then knit the sleeve downwards from there and reverse shaping by decreasing at the intervals where the pattern says to increase. Choose the method you’re most comfortable with!

You may want to wind your own center pull ball if your yarn cake is starting to collapse on itself during a project, or if you just prefer the stability a center pull ball provides, but don’t have a ball winder handy.

- To wind your own center pull ball, start with the end tucked under your thumb in the palm of your hand.

- Wind the yarn around three fingers a few times, then remove the yarn, and wind in the opposite direction. You want to make sure you’re keeping the tension nice and loose. You don’t want to stretch the yarn at all while you’re doing this.

- Now start winding the yarn around the loops you’ve created. Once you have all the yarn contained, put your thumb into the space where your center strand is coming out and continue winding. It may look a little sloppy at first, but it’ll neaten up as you continue.

- Try to wind a few times in each section and move around the ball to keep in even. When you’re done, just remove your thumb and pull on the center strand. A small bunch of yarn will come out at first, this was the base for our ball. Once that’s out, you have an easy to use center pull ball.

Check out the video below to see this technique in action!

This week’s tip comes from Sara Delaney, one of our fantastic crochet instructors here at WEBS!

Making hairpin lace can be a really relaxing activity until it comes time to take it off the loom. How do you coral all those loops? Tin foil is your friend for this one! Simply pull off a piece of foil that is long enough and wide enough to wrap your loom like a present. Lay the loom down in the center of the foil, remove the top or bottom bar and slide the pegs out of your work leaving all those loops right in the midle of your foil, nice and neat. Fold up the sides, top and bottom and that strip will stay nice and tidy until you are ready to join it with others into a larger piece.

If you’ve never tried hairpin lace before and are curious what it is, check out some of these great patterns for inspiration.

• Filatura di Crosa Stole
• Wavy Coral Scarf from Interweave Crochet
• Marconi Beach Bookmark, great pattern if you’re new to hairpin lace
• Siona Stole from Crochet Lace Innovations by Doris Chan
• Tranquil Hairpin Lace Tunic from Crochet So Fine by Kristin Omdahl