Fall Colours socks IV: Helical stripes

Helical stripes is a very easy (and a very clever) method to obtain jogless stripes when knitting in the round. This method is not more often used because it has the great limitation that you can use as many colours as you would like but you can only knit one round of each colour at a time. So say, for example, if you would like to knit 3 rounds of blue, then 3 of red, then 3 of yellow, you can do it, but you would need to threat each round as a different colour and thus use 3 bobbins of each colour. If you take a look at the video below, you will better understand what I am trying to say here. You will also realize that very fast this becomes a bit dreadful to do. I am using 3 yarn ends for three-colour stripes in my socks and it is already a bit of a pain as it is. So this is a method that is really OK if you have a 2 or 3 round repeat but not much more.

That said, helical stripes still deserve to be better known. I see a lot of patterns where people use one round stripes for socks, for example, but are not using this method and just living with all those jogs unnecessarily. Another use for this method, besides socks, is super chunky yarn stripes, for example in hats. Since with thick yarn one round stripe is already pretty thick.

Here is a great video to learn this technique. There is only one piece of information missing from the video, which I find important and I had to learn the hard way. There is a good reason to only go as far as three stitches before the previous colour and this is in order to keep the tension of your stitches even. If you do not do this, you end up with a some weird stitches where you changed yarn. Now the video (by Jen Arnall-Culliford):