Russian Join

In this video, I am going to show you how to work the Russian joint. So the Russian joint is a way of joining two pieces of yarn together. They could be the same color. Maybe you're just running out of your ball of yarn. You need to join a new yarn um to it or you might be joining two different colors together. You could be making uh a magic ball of yarn where you take all your yarn scraps and then you um add them all together into one big ball of yarn, which is kind of a fun project to use up your leftovers. Um But either way the Russian joint is, uh, it's a fun way to join your yarn. Um where you don't end up having to weave in any ends later because you do it ahead of time. So let me show you how this works. This, this is what it looks like, you know, there's no knot or anything like that right here. The yarn actually doubles back on itself. Now, I'm gonna show you how to do that. So the first thing you're gonna do is you are going to thread your yarn needle and you're gonna make a little loop on one end, um, of one piece of yarn. And this really doesn't work very well with a one ply yarn. So you're gonna need to have a, a yarn like that has more than one ply. So you are able to send your needle down through the center of the yarn, like through the core of the yarn. All right. So I have just a little bit of a yarn tail here and I'm going to be making a loop on the end of my yarn by inserting the tip of my needle. And I'm gonna kind of just slide it through the center of where the yarn twists. I gently put my thumb and my finger on either side and just sort of actually I sliding the yarn up onto the needle is really what I'm doing. Um Another approach you can take is if you are having trouble with that, you can take your, your needle and kind of wind it through like this to get it to go in through the middle of the, the yarn if that helps you kind of get it started. But in any case, what you want is you want your needle to be going through the center of the yarn and then you are going to um, just pull this back up onto, you don't wanna lose your, you don't wanna lose the little hole you're making at the end. Um So you gotta hang onto that, but you're gonna pull the needle all the way through here and it's ok if this bunches up a little bit like that, sometimes that just happens and then you can fix it later. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull on this and I don't care if the needle comes off the end of my yarn that's completely fine at this point. So I've created a little loop here and don't worry about trimming this yet. We're gonna do that later, but you need to make sure that you have a little bit of a hole here in order to get your yarn to go from the opposite piece to go through there. All right. So we're gonna thread the next piece of yarn onto our needle and then we're gonna use our needle to thread it right through kind of that eye that we made that little hole in the yarn. OK. So our needle, um, our yarn is going through that loop right there. And now we are gonna do the same process where we just insert our needle through in the middle of the, where the ply is kind of all spin around. We're trying to get our needle to go right through the center of the yarn and you'll find there are some yarns that just are better suited for this. Um, you know, depending on fiber type or how the, how it feels if it's really sticky sometimes it is hard just to send it through. But if you're able to get it through there, it really grips tightly and it's a very, very secure joint. Um, ok, so I've pushed it through a little ways there and I'm going to pull this loose yarn up and off the end of the needle. I'm just going to keep pulling on this until the end of my yarn pops out. Let's see, where is it right there? And it's OK if it comes off the needle. So this looks a little bit loose and messy, but you can kind of tighten that up just by sliding it and twisting it a little bit here. So it looks a little bit more like a regular piece of yarn. And then you are going to pull on these extra yarn tails. Ok. So just the little bits that are hanging out, you're gonna pull on those until the loops in the center are tightened all the way and there is no longer a loop there. So you're just gonna slide that yarn through and same thing for this side till there is no longer a hole there. And you can see I'm kind of twisting the yarn to help it. Keep that nice little twist in there. It just helps hide the, the yarn just a little bit better. Ok. So now we have a very secure joint in the middle, very secure. And then when you stitch it up, you won't even see that at all. So in order to get rid of these little bits here, you can just trim them off. And what I like to aim for here is I like to trim them off at a little bit of an angle. Instead of just chopping them straight across like this. I like to trim them off slightly at an angle like this because I feel like it just blends in a little bit easier with the rest of the yarn there. So let me do that again with this side. So there's our little yarn end and I just put my scissors right here and do a little snip and you just have to be careful. You're not actually cutting any of those other strands that you're just clipping off the very end of the yarn. OK. And there we have it, the very sturdy Russian joint and like I said before, once this is crocheted up, um, or you can use this in your knitting, of course too, then you won't even be able to see that theme unless of course, it's two different colors and you'll see it. Um It will not be noticeable and it will be very, very secure. So I hope that you've enjoyed this lesson on the Russian joint and I hope you try it out in your next project.