Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Amigurumi Stripes With No Joins

One of the "experimental techniques" I tried recently was to get a lovely two-tone stripe, amigurumi-style, that didn't have joins or that icky jagged bit where you switch colours at the end of a round.

In response to a question on Flickr, I recently posted the following:
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Ooooh, I just did this (can you tell I'm quite proud of myself?)...I have some pictures here: www.flickr.com/photos/noisypitta/

The way I did it was:
1. Complete one round in one colour, put a stitch marker in the loop left on your hook.
2. Remove the crochet hook, join second colour in the first stitch of the last round, then begin a round in the next stitch, counting the join as the first stitch of the round (e.g. if you're doing all sc, join colour 2 into first stitch with a sl st, then sc in the next stitch).
3. When you get to the last stitch of colour 1, put a stitch marker in the loop of colour 2 that's left on your hook.
4. Remove the crochet hook and insert it back into the loop of colour 1 and carry on with the round.

Repeat steps 3 and 4 for as long as you need. When you get to where you want to finish one of the stripe colours (in my pictures, I "finished" the white and carried on with the blue), in step 3, you just make the last stitch a sl st instead of a normal sc. Then when you come to that stitch on the next round, it's a smooth transition back to the beginning of the round.

I think all that is very confusing (it's kinda hard to describe). Best is just to try it.

(In response to: When I crochet alternating strips for an amigurumi, the stripes never look right. There is always a hiccup stitch when I start the next color in the new round. Is this typical for everyone or just typical of my bad crocheting technique? -- posted by smoochas)
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I'm thinking about cabling and braiding next, and the holy grail (of course) is how to make colour joins with a round of slip stitches and not have that "step" where the sl st joins back up with the main part of the round (you know what I'm talking about, right?)...Hmmm...

noisypitta.etsy.com

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