Knit Assist

About Knit Assist

I love to knit and have been doing it for far longer than I care to admit. I tried to do stranded colorwork last year and found it frustrating. It took 5 minutes just preparing the yarn, and I couldn't figure out how to keep the yarns evenly tensioned in one hand. I tried wrapping one color on my little finger and another on my ring finger. The yarns kept sticking to each other and one would un-tension the other. So, I tried holding one color in each hand. That was disastrous. I know lots of people do this kind of work, but I could not figure it out. 

I really wanted to learn how to do colorwork. Sometimes necessity is the mother of invention; sometimes desire is. I wanted a tool that would help me keep the same tension on each strand, keep the strands separate and would feed from one hand, the way I was used to. Nothing I could buy would do all those things. If I wanted a tool to fix my problem, I would have to design it myself. It took over a year, about 30 iterations and the help of an engineer, but I came up with a ring design that really pleases me and makes stranded work easy. I also designed it to make Brioche easy (another 2 color knitting technique). The top of the ring is detachable and can be turned over so that the knit color can always be on the right side, without having to re-thread the ring.  (If you know about one-pass brioche, you know that the color you will be using to knit with has to be to the right of the purl color, and the colors switch sides when you turn the work.)  Now, doing one pass brioche is painless.

My vision is that others will discover the joy and ease of doing colorwork and brioche with this tool. You might also find it useful for even tensioning in single strand knitting. Regardless of how you use it I hope you love the Knit Assist!

Happy Knitting!

Kim