Welcome to this Arnall-Culliford Techniques tutorial on the clasped weft join. The most difficult
thing about the clasped weft join is saying the name of it! It is an absolutely brilliant
little trick for changing colours or changing from one ball of yarn to a new ball of yarn.
This join is a way of changing colours or changing from an old ball of yarn to a new ball of yarn in the
same colour. And it's particularly helpful for yarns that won't felt. If you want to make an invisible
join with a felting yarn, then I would recommend splicing, and I'll leave a link, in the notes to
this video tutorial, on how to do that. But the clasped weft join is really handy for making an
invisible join when you've got a non-felting yarn. So this is my Briochevron Wrap by
Stephen West and I've used various superwash sock yarns to knit it with and this line here where the
pink speckled yarn is joining the teal yarn. I've changed from one to the other using the clasped
weft join and you can't see, other than the tiny bit of an end there, where that join has happened.
If you look very closely, you'll see that the last row of stitches and the first row of stitches are
worked with doubled yarns and that's essentially how this works. Let me show you how to do it...
If you're just joining an old ball of yarn to a new ball of yarn, work
until you've got a reasonably short tail of yarn remaining.
What you're then going to do, is you're going to fold that piece of yarn in half,
and you're going to work a couple of stitches with the yarn folded in half.
You're then going to get your new ball of yarn and you're going to thread the yarn through that loop
by a similar amount, so overlap it so that your tail's about the same length as it
was on the other one. And you're then going to hold those yarns together.
And you're going to carry on knitting with the two strands until you've passed the join point.
You then just keep working with the two yarns
until you come to the end of the tail – maybe one more stitch –
and then leave the tail on the wrong side of the work and carry on with just one.
So you have a section of doubled stitches along here and when you come to the next round you're
obviously just going to knit straight over them, working each of those double strands as one stitch.
And you will get a section of a fabric that's slightly thicker, where there are
double stitches, but you would always have a section of fabric where you've got an
end woven in, and this just means that you have a basically invisible join with two
little ends that you can trim later. But that's literally all you have to do. It's super simple!
If you're using this trick to change colours, and you want the colour change to happen at
a specific point, all you need to do is work to the colour change point, and then mark where the
yarn is coming out of the fabric, and that just needs to be your fold point. So then
fold your tail back on itself work a few stitches with the doubled yarn, making sure
that where your new yarn joins in is that that marked fold point, and you'll find that
you go seamlessly from one yarn to the other with your colour change in the perfect spot.
I hope you've enjoyed that clasp weft join video tip and that you'll find it helpful for your
future knitting projects. We've got lots more hints and tips over on our website. Do click the link up
here to go and explore, and you can subscribe to our YouTube channel using the button down here
so that you're sure not to miss our next video tutorial. Thanks ever so much for watching! Bye-bye!