Joining Up

One of the most common questions I get from new knitters has to do with joining a new ball of yarn to a project you're working on. There are actually several ways to join a new ball, including just dropping the old yarn at the end of the row and picking up the new yarn to knit the next row.

I will do this if I happen to be about to run out of yarn at the end of a row, but I'd rather not waste a lot of yarn if I still have a good bit left but not enough to make it back across the row. In that case I'll do an overlap join (pictured here) to make a smooth transition in the middle of a row.

But my all-time favorite method for joining a new ball of yarn has got to be the felted join, also known as a spit join. You can only do this on fibers that will felt, but it actually fuses the fiber of the two balls of yarn together so you don't even have any ends to weave in!