My most recent knitting project was a pair of sock for my brother-in-law. I used the 'Simple Skyp Sock' pattern by Adrienne Ku. The pattern is really easy and looks great. I also added some extra interest by adding a different colour for the heel and toe.

To make it even more interesting, the lead up to the toe was done in the Fibonacci sequence. This is where you add the last 2 numbers for the next number (i.e. 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, ...).

Of course, this also meant I had to learn to do jogless stripes. Why is that, you ask? When you are knitting in the round (rather than back and forth), you are actually making a spiral of stitches. This means when you get back to where you started the round, you will be one stitch higher and your stripes won't match up.

A lesson on how to make your stripes jogless is after the jump...



When you knit normally in the round, you create jogs in any colour changes.


You can see that the blue and green lines don't match up in neat little stripes. To avoid this, you simply have to slip a stitch. Here are the steps:

• Step 1: Switch to your new colour and knit an entire round.
• Step 2: Slip the first stitch of the next round purlwise and place a stitch marker.
• Step 3: Continue on in your new colour for as long as your pattern says ending at the stitch marker.
• Step 4: Switch to the next colour and knit up to marker.
• Step 5: Remove the stitch marker, slip the first stitch after the stitch marker purlwise, and replace the stitch marker.
• And then just repeat for any new colour changes.

What you are doing is pulling the stitch below up to match the row above.

This is also a traveling jogless stripe. Instead of slipping stitches in the same column, the slipping is slowly moved to the left. This is good if you have many stripes, because if you stacked all of the slipped stitches in one column, it will be more noticeable and your knitted piece will be tight along the slipped stitches. It also makes it possible to do 1 row high stripes.

Another important tip is to watch what you are doing with the other colour yarn when you are not knitting with it. Instead of cutting it off, you can catch it every 3 to 4 rows by bringing it to the front and knitting over it. This means you won't have to weave in any ends and you won't have any long pieces of yarn inside your piece to get caught on later.

Here is a great lesson on doing stripes by Eunny Jang: