I love love love stripes!! Always have, even before they became a thing. And as soon as I made my first striped project in the round, I learned to knit jogless stripes. In fact, I’ve never knit anything striped without working jogless stripes. Yikes. The whole idea makes me break out in an itchy scratchy rash. Why? Why?! Why would anyone knit stripes with jogs? Especially if you can avoid it so easily? Ugh. My eyes bleed just imagining the epic fail. But even I, who am no stranger to knitting jogless stripes, just got schooled by a simple cowl (with a little help from Interweave Knits).
This is the method I have always used for knitting jogless stripes: knitting one round with the new color and then at the start of the second round, picking up the old color from the stitch below and knitting it together with the new color, creating an elongated stitch. This works fine for pretty much most things I’ve ever knit. However, while knitting my Duotone (above) which is knit at a loose-ish gauge on slightly larger needles to accentuate the drape of the yarn, I felt dissatisfied with my trusty technique. Not enough to really do anything about it (I’m kinda lazy that way) just vaguely critical of the way the stitches were lining up before and after each color change.
Then one evening, while waiting for my son to quit goofing around while taking care of business in his bathroom (seriously, the kid can make an epic journey out of potty time or toothbrushing; he’s the consummate dawdler) I picked up an old back issue of Interweave Knits and started thumbing through it. This is often the only way I can keep my head from exploding when he’s in there singing away, oblivious to the ginormous mommy volcano building pressure outside. And whaddya know, there’s a whole article about new ways to knit jogless stripes in the round (Interweave Knits, Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2009. “Beyond The Basics, New Methods for Jogless Stripes in the Round”. Techknitter. Pg 28-30). I fully admit it. I skimmed. I didn’t really want to know why, just how. Bad Knittymuggins!! But it was enough to get me on my way, and now I know where to find it again when I finally decide I want to know why it works that way. Just kidding. You know I’ll never come back and read it when I could totally be knitting.
Anyway, I settled on a combination of my usual method above for the thin stripes, and the Stationary Slip-Stitch method for jogless stripes from the article for the wider stripes. It looked better and I was pleased with the change. And then I finished the cowl and the funny bit at the end of my graft was bugging me so I rearranged the cowl a little to make that annoying nubbin disappear inside the cowl. And guess what else ended up “hidden” inside the cowl at that point? The stupid jogless stripes I’d agonized over the whole time I was knitting. And do you know who is now the biggest dumba$$ in the universe? Yeah. That would be me.
But at least my neck will be cozy.