It really might not bother you if your socks don’t match, and that’s fine 🙂

Luckily, you have two options for dealing with them. Sometimes, the joined-on yarn colour doesn’t match and that can be even more frustrating, but a ball of yarn isn’t considered to be faulty unless there are more than three knots in the ball (for commercial yarn it may be different for hand-dyed) so often you are left in the middle of a project with a dilemma – and a join! Other mills will deal with their yarns differently and you might find the same kind of join or a knot depending on the reason for the break and how it is fixed.Ī break in the yarn can be very frustrating, especially if you are knitting with striped or patterned yarn, as the break can upset the rhythm of the yarn pattern and you can end up with matching socks not quite matching after all. There, one of the machines specifically checks the yarn for slubs and knots and if it finds anything, it will cut the yarn with a laser and splice it together again in the blink of any eye, and this is obviously what has happened to this section of my Winter Icicle yarn. It’s part of the manufacturing process – and I saw it in action at the West Yorkshire Spinners mill from when I went to visit (you can visit the mill with me in this post here). I was part-way down my second Emergency Sock (you can read my blog post about Emergency Socks here) when I came across this join …

Anybody who has ever bought a ball or skein of yarn, whether commercially produced or hand-dyed, has probably come across a join, knot or a dye fault in the yarn at one time or another – it’s one of those “occupational hazard” things about being a knitter!

Rejoin yarn knitting instructions