How to Crochet in a Continuous Round

This week's post is a follow up from last week where I showed you how to make the invisible join. Today, I'm going to illustrate how it can be used to change colours more neatly, especially in your crochet projects worked in continuous rounds.

Start with the invisible join

You'll need to know about the invisible join as this is the key to hiding colour changes when working in the round. You can find the full tutorial in this post or read the abridged instructions below.

Abridged invisible join instructions:

Work to the end of your round. Fasten off, pull the yarn through the final stitch and thread it onto a tapestry needle.

Skip the next stitch and, working under both loops of the following stitch, insert your needle from back (wrong or private side) to front (right or public side) and pull it through (but not too tight).

Thread your yarn through the back loop of the final stitch (the stitch you pulled your yarn through when fastening off).

You have created a faux stitch on top of the stitch that you skipped. This is the invisible part!

Weave in the ends securely to finish without pulling the yarn too tight.

Here's an idea of what it will look like

Changing colour using the standing single crochet (UK standing double crochet)

Once you have created the invisible join you can just join your new colour as if you were starting a whole new round.

In this example we are using a standing single crochet stitch. To do this, make a slip knot on your hook with the new colour.

Note that I am left handed, so if you are right handed you will see a mirror image of the step by step photos below!

Insert your hook into the first stitch of your new round. Can you even find where the join was?? Use a place marker if it's important you join your new colour in the same position.

Yarn over and pull up a loop so you have two loops on your hook.

Tuck the tail of the new colour behind your hook so you can work over it. If you haven't weaved in your ends from the last colour, you can work over the top of that too.

Yarn over an pull through 2 loops to complete your standing single crochet (UK double crochet).

Continue to work around, crocheting over your tails, until you get back to the start.

Continue working straight into the top of the first standing single crochet to carry on working in the round. If you're changing colour again immediately then you can work another invisible join.

If you look closely, you can see in the image below that the colour change is almost seamless.

There is a slight blip (for want of a better word), which is generated because you are restarting the spirals when you work into the first stitch. But it's pretty negligible.

How does the invisible colour change compare to a standard colour change?

Let's compare the invisible join to the standard colour change.

To make a standard colour change when working in continual rounds you are effectively changing colours mid-round.

This is how it works:

You would pull through the new colour on the last pull through of the stitch just before you want to change colour.

Then you would simply continue working in rounds.

Here's what that looks like.

You can immediately see how jarring the new colour change looks. It makes the whole thing look a bit wonky!!

I hope I've convinced you that making the invisible join takes the finished look of your projects up to the next level when it comes to changing colours!

I'd love to hear if you have any other hacks on finishing techniques. I'm always looking for simple tricks like this that have a disproportionately positive impact!!

Happy Hooking

Dx

simshatte1968.blogspot.com

Source: https://doradoes.co.uk/2020/08/15/how-to-change-colour-almost-invisibly-in-continual-rounds/

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