The felted join is the single best way I have found to join to pieces of yarn. It works best on wool or wool blend yarns with at least 30% wool. Superwash wool won’t felt together, though. They science it to be unfeltable.
I learned to master and love the felted join when knitting with my first skein of Noro Kureyon yarn way back in the dark ages of March, 2005. After encountering not one but seventy-five zillion knots and weird colorways (as one does in Noro) I learned this method for splicing together two pieces of yarn and I have never looked back.
Here’s another use for the felted join: Frankensteining your stash. You can join any two mostly-wool yarns this way. I knit 90% of the time with Noro yarn because I love the feel and the funky colors and the surprise of seeing what color or fiber or texture comes next. But surprises are not always awesome. In every Noro there is an occasional shocking dose of acid-green yarn or a mysteriously long black colorway spun right in the middle of a delightfully pink-hued skein. Here’s a dirty secret: sometimes I cut out the colorways and rejoin the yarn to my liking. The felted join has come in very handy when I want to snip entire hanks in half and dissect the acid green/black colorway.
Perhaps it would be normal to discard these, but I am a very thrifty person (see: hoarder tendencies) and instead of tossing that gorgeous, expensive yarn I just save it until I have enough weird green/black/whatever colors to felt together into a Franken-skein.
How to make a felted join
- Snip out the knot.
- Fray the ends of both pieces of yarn
- Place then on top of each other, mixing the yarn together in a yarn straddle
- Wet this portion of the yarn with water. It’s ok to get it really wet, it will dry.
- Rub the yarn together semi-vigorously in the palm of your hands until it begins to fuse (felt) together.
And here it is in pictures:
Hope you “felt” my enthusiasm on that one! hehehehe
