Zero Waste/Magic Ball
Mary Beth TempleDo you have lots of small bits of yarn piling up - too good to toss, too small to make a project? Use up those scraps by making a Magic Ball with zero waste! The resulting knit projects give you a wild array of colors - and since the scraps came from your other projects they are likely to make you happy. For more on using up partial skeins check out this video on estimating yardage of a partial skein so you can assign it to a project.
Hi, I'm Mary Beth Temple and I'm going to show you one of my very best tricks for using up the last little scraps of yarn. They're just too big to throw out, but they pile up and what are you gonna do with them? Now, I wanna keep my worsted weight together or my bulky together or my fingering together, whatever I wanna use all yarns of the same weight. But what I like to do is tie them into a magic ball and then I knit with that yarn and just let the stripes do what they may. So to do this, I'm going to take some of my scraps of yarn and I don't know what this knot is called.
I've heard it called all kinds of things, but essentially what you're going to do is overlap your two ends and tie an overhand knot. So in this case, I have a light blue and a dark blue. So I'm going to tie an overhand knot in my light blue that encloses the dark blue. I'm not gonna pull it super tight yet. I want it to have some play and then I'm going to tie an overhand knot in my dark blue that encloses my light blue and I'm not going to tie it super tight yet.
I'm just gonna get myself going here. So now I'm going to pull very slowly and carefully till they almost meet. Now, I'm going to tighten up knot number one, I'm going to tighten up knot number two and now I'm going to pull, so they're right on top of each other and I'm going to pull with all my might. I am really putting some effort into this and that knot is not going to go anywhere. Now, you have two choices.
If you wanted to, you could leave some super, super long tails and let them hang out and look like tassels on your finished work. Or what I did is I cut them very close because this knot is super durable. It's not going to come out. So I am just hiding the knots in my knitting as I go and I'm trimming my threads close. Now, I'm gonna grab my ball of yarn and wind it up.
Let's do that one more time. There is my dark blue and let's add this sort of rosy color. So I'm going to overlap them. I'm going to take one color in this case, my dark blue and tie an overhand, not enclosing the rose, but not pulling it super tight. Now, I'm going to take my rose and tie an overhand knot over my blue enclosing it and not yet pulling it super tight.
There's my overhand knot, so there's one knot, there's two knots. I'm going to start pulling the two sides so they get a little closer together. Now I'm gonna tighten up knot number one, I'm going to tighten up knot number two. And I'm gonna pull, pull, pull, pull, pull to make sure that that's a good firm knot and it's not going to come away in my knitting. And I can either leave this out as a tasseled end or I can cut it super, super close.
Then all I have to do is wind that onto my magic ball so I can make my magic ball as big or as small as I want it to be. And then what I'm knitting, I just let the stripes come where they want to, the wider the stripe, of course, the more yarn I had in that color. And if I made this piece a lot wider, if it was say a sweater front or something, then my stripes would be no more narrow, but you can use any length scrap that you have and give it new life in your scrap projects.
I love this knot! I use it all the time. If I’m concerned about a knot being next to the skin I use I think it’s called a Russian join where you make a loop around your new yarn and sew the tail through the working yarn 6-10 times then fold back the new yarn and do the same, and finally you pull each side until the loops close. It makes a slightly thickened bit of yarn on each side of the join but it’s much better against the skin or in a place like the bottom of a sock or slipper