Tips & Tricks for Devious Knitters: How to Knit an I-Cord Edge as You Go, And Why You Might Want To

August 8, 2020

Have I mentioned that one of the things I don’t really care for in knitting is weaving in ends?

I’m as much of a sucker as anyone else for using ALL. THE. COLORS. And while self-striping yarns and long color-change yarns are fantastic, for some projects, you just have to bite the bullet and use many yarns. (Fair Isle, I am LOOKING AT YOU.)

There are a few different ways of dealing with all the ends besides weaving them in with a needle, and which method I choose depends a lot on what the overall project is.

I recently finished knitting Nighshift for the third time. While that pattern has oodles of color changes, it also has a convenient built-in solution for all those ends: I-cord edging!

If you’re knitting an I-cord edge right along as you go, you don’t actually need to weave in any but the beginning and end tails of yarn. It seemed too good to be true at first, and I have to confess, for the first shawl, I wove the ends after I was done knitting. The second shawl was my experiment — would the edges hold without being woven in? They absolutely did. By the time I knit the third shawl, I was confident of the technique.

I promise, that I-cord is full of yarn ends.

I left the tails nice and long — about eight inches. As I was beginning each new row, I made sure to bring the working yarn up from under the tails to keep them securely inside the I-cord stitches. And that really is all I had to do to deal with the dozens of ends that Nightshift creates. One caveat: I was working with wool, and wool has the advantage of sticking to itself a bit. I wouldn’t suggest this technique for slippery yarns.

These are the only ends I had to weave in for the entire project.

I-cord is a great edging for anything knit flat like shawls or scarves, and it’s easy enough to knit on as you go:

  • You will be adding 3 extra stitches (or however many stitches you are working I-cord over. I suggest a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 4) to each side of your work (6 total in my example).
  • On the Right side: Knit across your row in pattern then slip the last 3 stitches (purlwise) with yarn in front (WYIF). two hands slipping stitches in knitting with light blue yarn
  • Turn the work. Knit those first three stitches as normal. You’ll be bringing the yarn from a little farther away, which is correct. Knitting with it tightens the stitches you just slipped to form the I-Cord.two hands knitting with light blue yarn
  • On the Wrong Side: After the first three stitches described above, knit across your row, then slip the last 3 stitches (purlwise) with yarn in front (WYIF).
  • Turn your work and knit the first 3 stitches as normal, once again bringing the yarn from farther away to pull the stitches together for the I-cord.

More simply put: Slip the final 3 stitches of each row purlwise with yarn in front. That’s it!

You can also add an I-cord cast-on and bind-off to make it nice and tidy all the way around, but I’ll save those instructions for another day.

If you’re interested in learning more about weaving in ends, or how to avoid doing it, I’ll be teaching sixteen different ways to deal with yarn ends in my upcoming class at Fiberworld 2020: “Secrets of Splicing: Up Your Ends Game” Thursday, August 20.