How To
How to Spit-Felt
Dear Ann,
In last week’s post about my temperature blanket, I mentioned that I’d decided to eliminate ends to be woven in at the right edge of my blanket, by spit-felting to connect the yarn when I change colors at the beginning of a row.
It took me about a week to figure out that there were too many ends on the right edge: enough for a pony tail.
People commented, emailed, phoned, and DM’d to ask this question: WHAT IS SPIT-FELTING? (OK they didn’t phone.)
Spit-felting, I’m happy to report, is exactly what it sounds like: felting with spit—or your moistener of choice. If my temperature blanket ends up lightly scented with chamomile and mint, it won’t be a coincidence: Sleepytime tea is my night-time knitting beverage of choice. I dangle the two ends of Felted Tweed in my mug and felt it right up, barely having to glance down from Around the World in 80 Days.
Spit-Felting 101
Spit-felting is a low-tech trick that relies on moisture and friction to bond fibers together. Important note: It only works with yarns that are primarily animal fibers.
In spit-felting, you felt the end of the old color together with the beginning of the new color, and you keep on knitting. Look ma no ends!
The video up top is an excellent Little Lesson video from Jen Arnall-Culliford, in which she demonstrates what she calls (more politely) a felted join. She’s using the same yarn as I’m using for my temperature blanket: Rowan Felted Tweed.
Jen’s video explains everything you need to know about the technique itself—just ignore the mentions of intarsia unless they’re relevant to the project you’re working on.
Where to Place the Felted Join
In Jen’s video, she was joining two ends of the same color yarn. When I’m starting a new stripe on my temperature blanket, I’m changing colors.
So the question arises: where do I put the join, to avoid an obvious smudge of the old color on the new stripe, or the new color on the old stripe?
Here’s a way to do it that minimizes color overlap.
Step 1: Knit to the end of the row of the old color. Break the yarn with an inch or so to spare.
Step 2: Unpick eight stitches. (Attention new knitters: there’s a great little video on how to unknit stitches in the Skill Set: Beginning Knitting video app. I wish I’d had it when I was trying to figure out how to tink back safely!)
Step 3: Follow the instructions in Jen’s video, aiming the overlap of the two strands at that inch at the end.
Step 4: Finish the row of the old color and carry on knitting the new stripe.
After a while, you can just knit to the last eight stitches of the old color and estimate the length you need before the break, do the felted join, and carry on.
Because Felted Tweed has tweedy flecks, the two colors blend nicely, and the overlap is hard to see. With other yarns, the color change might be more obvious, and you might decide you’d rather weave in the ends. You are in the driver’s seat on this one!
A Confession
I don’t always separate the two plies of Felted Tweed and break off one of them. Because of the felted nature of this yarn, the plies don’t always separate easily. For me, the felting process compresses the fiber enough that it’s ok to just felt the two ends together, all four plies. Again, this is the knitter’s choice. Knitting lets us each choose how far to dial up the finesse on the refine-o-meter.
Good News For Bang Out a Sweater Knitalongers!
Léttlopi was born for spit-felting. When you’re knitting the solid-color body and sleeves of your Daytripper Cardigan, you can use spit-felting to avoid ends to weave in when you join a new skein of the main color. Just follow Jen’s instructions in the video above, and Bob’s your uncle!
Love,
Kay
I thank you and my temperature blanket thanks you!
Started my blanket last night and woke up thinking about brushing up on this topic and here you are. Thank you!
Great stuff! I’m guessing it would work for weaving, as well…..many thanks.
It does, and it looks great
I love this technique! My blanket edge is looking so much better without all the woven-in ends.
Great! I use it all the time with appropriate fibers. It doesn’t work with superwash yarn, though,
I have spit spliced superwash wool before and it has worked. Use at your own risk!
Definitely depends on the yarn. After I had spit-spliced dozens of projects, maybe 10 of them SW, with never a problem, a superwash baby blanket fell apart at each splice within months of my gifting it. Very very embarrassing & impossible to repair once the mom actually got back to me about it.
I like using one hand and the jeans I’m wearing. It gives some really friction and always works faster than using the palms of both hands
When I learned this trick a few years ago, it was a game changer. Until then, I didn’t like doing striped things with lots of colors because of all those ends. Now, easy peasy color changes means almost everything I knit these days has stripes or lots of color changes.
I am about six blocks into my own combination green/peach/orange Color Explosion throw and well, duh, I should have been doing a spit join!! So much tidier! So from now on, that’s what’s going to happen. Thank you for reminding me of a simple technique that is just brilliant.
Been spit-felting for years…it’s such a time-saver (and yarn saver!) I use it whenever I can. And for most non-animal fibers: Russian join! Works almost the same way.
Thanks for the reminder about the Russian join!!
For what it’s worth I add a small extra step— I thread one end through a sharp embroidery needle and weave it through the other end going in the opposite direction so they are intertwined, and then spit felt them together. Found it’s way simpler for me than fussing with breaking off one of the plies and gets a similarly smooth result
You’re killing me, Kay. I finished my garter stripe shawl, which is about the size of Montana, last night while watching Nathen Chen win his gold medal. And now I’m facing eleventy-billion ends to weave in.
I’m anxious to try snapping off one of the plies. I recently spit felted a dk yarn overlapping the ends full strength and the join is too thick and not as flexible as the rest of the fabric.
I also spit felt new skeins onto the ones that have run out mid-row, especially helpful when playing yarn chicken! doesn’t everyone have an Uncle Bob?
Been doing this for awhile! But my understanding is that it’s the enzymes in saliva, very specifically, that work to create a strong join with natural animal fibers, not simply the wetting of the yarn with a liquid.
This is why knitters don’t have a secret handshake.
Haha!!
Brilliant! Good thing I’m getting a late start on this!
I’ve found that my slipped stitch edge on my temperature blanket looks better if I split the plies and felt only two plies together. I’m getting speedy at it now.
OK, I just found you yesterday and I am in love. Great information and beautiful projects.
I’ve been spit-splicing my color explosion throw, and rather than planning ahead as Kay describes, I wait until the end of the row and then splice with 4-6 inches of the old color because honestly, one of my favorite things is the little section of old color that starts the row of the new color.
Saved me a Google search!
If I want to avoid mixing the two colours, I just fold one over the other so when I spit-splice each colour is being felted to itself.
last year i made a temperature COAT (following EZ’s ASJ pattern) and spit-spliced the heck outta the wool i used (morehouse merino). later i knit another (much smaller) sweater using 20 colors of kate davies milarrochy tweed, changing shades every 1-3 rows, and again spit A LOT. this method is a tad messy but a life-saver, esp. when you aren’t too keen on weaving in ends. fyi, i only separate plies and trim when the wool is extra fluffy. go forth and be spittiful!
There are few things in my life that I have learned that is pure magic. This is definitely magic!