Our designer of the month is Betsy Preston. A local talent, her hats particularly might come is useful for our service knitters! They sure look sized right and cozy! Check her out on Ravelry, Instagram and her website.

IMPORTANT: Some users report experiencing migraines and seizures when accessing Ravelry due to their site redesign. Links in this blog post direct to Ravelry pages and are spelled out accordingly. If you are prone to either of these issues, please proceed with caution when clicking the Ravelry links.

Now that jogging season is officially upon us (or not!) I thought I'd share some knitting tips relating to one of my favorite knitting motifs (stripes!) and one of their downfalls (jogs!)

What is the jog? When you knit in the round, you are basically knitting in a spiral, so when you change color on the first stitch of a new round it will look like it is up a stitch instead of going straight around.

There are a couple of tricks to fix and here are the two I use.

1. Picking up the stitch from the last row

This technique works best if your stripes are wider than one round. I also use it in color work patterns.

Knit one round of your new color. When you get to the second round of the new color, pick up the stitch of the old color from the round below and knit it with the first stitch of the new color.

Continue knitting.

This elongates the stitch and makes the stripes appear more even. This technique does have its downside in that the elongated stitch is not quite as long as two rounds of stitches would be. So, if you do it a lot on a project you will get a little pulling at the start of the round. That can often be blocked out.

2. Moving the color change from the first stitch

If you move the color change a couple of stitches in from the start of the round if gives a much smoother effect.

This technique works for single row stripes as well as ones that are wider. Here is how single row stripes look when worked by changing the color on the first stitch:

You do have to be careful to keep the tension even at your color change with this method, but don't you always when you are doing colorwork. Also it does really show the spiral in the first and last rounds you work, but over a section of single row stripes it makes for a nice straight line, such as on my Clam Sweater (Ravelry pattern page).

Do you have a favorite trick that you use to hide your "jogs" while knitting in the round?

In the first blog post about the Variations on a Theme Challenge, we talked about the variations of the 1898 hat pattern (Ravelry pattern page) that MKG knitters had made with stripes. In this post, we focus on other colorwork variations.

IMPORTANT: Some users report experiencing migraines and seizures when accessing Ravelry due to their site redesign. Links in this blog post direct to Ravelry pages and are spelled out accordingly. If you are prone to either of these issues, please proceed with caution when clicking the Ravelry links.

Barbara Ronnigen and Kay Crowthers (strikkedame55 on Ravelry) added colorwork bands to the crowns of their hats. Barbara knit hers with Big Twist Twinkle (97% acrylic, 3% polyester), a machine washable and dryable yarn that is soft and easy to knit with. She added the burgundy colorwork to give a little more pizazz to the grey.

Kay used red and white Wool-Ease worsted with an inserted snowflake pattern based on the Winter Joy hat pattern.

For her second hat, Kay let the yarn, Wool-Ease DK Cake, do the talking with a subtle color shift. She says, "This has been a great hat for recent binge TV watching."

Linda Bruemmer (lindabea on Ravelry) created a variation with colorblocking reminiscent of either Marvin the Martian from Bugs Bunny or a Mondrian geometric painting. Her yarn is Valley Yarns Northampton, left over from making the Illusion Cube blanket.

And back to stripes with a couple of hot-off-the-needles submissions...

Joyce Slack, who says, "What fun construction and warm too!" knit an unmarked stash yarn with 3 rows of varying width stripes as a simple variation.

Barbara Rice (babsknits126 on Ravelry), whose plain version we saw in the first Variations on a Theme blog post, produced more elaborate stripes with leftover machine washable Red Heart yarn.

Barbara also made a variation with a yarn other than worsted, which will be showcased in our next Variations on a Theme blog post, highlighting variations to the structure of the hat, some depending on the yarn weight and some just for fun!

There's still time to have your hat featured in the MKG blog; just drop me an email with a photo and description at swie0006@umn.edu.