Wednesday, April 20, 2016

What is a Magic Ball?

I read about the 'magic ball' in Melissa Leapman's book stashbuster knits. Basically you join a lot of short lengths of yarn and then knit with them. Melissa describes two ways of joining the pieces. The first is to knot them:
Melissa says she trims the knots to about 1.5 cm and that in stocking stitch knitting, all the knots will come to the reverse side.
The other method is a Russian join.
You link two pieces of yarn and then thread each yarn back through itself:
The effort involved doesn't seem to me much different from normal threading in ends! The only advantage would be that it's done before knitting.

7 comments:

  1. It does look like the same amount of work. I wonder if it's more pleasing to knit because you know the work is already done.

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  2. I agree with your conclusion - effort just has a time-phase shift.
    I guess these methods would be okay if one didn't mind where each scrap colour went.

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  3. I tried a magic ball once, but didn't know about stocking stitch keeping the ends inside and it nearly drove me crazy. The Russian join method looks intriguing.

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  4. Kaffe Fassett uses this Magic Ball technique for his beautiful works of art; but I think he actually uses a patterned yarn like Noro, so that the colour changes wouldn't be as stark.

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  5. I looked up magic ball after you posted about it. The directions I read were for the Russian join, which looks like the perfect way to join the threads. I do have quite a few odds and ends, so I think I'll give this a try. Thanks for posting about the magic ball!

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