How to knit continuous tassels

October 16, 2015 3:55 PM

How would you knit these tassels?

They're on a commercial scarf, and my mum would like to replicate the effect on her own knitting, assuming it's feasible to do by hand. There seem to be no cuts or separate pieces stitched together, the wool threads just go directly from the scarf body into the tassels.

If there are search terms we could be using or a proper name for the technique, that would be great too. I can try to take a photo with it stretched out if that would help. Thanks!

posted by lucidium to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (18 answers total)

Are they just cut on the ends? They look like they're almost fraying at the bottom. Can you take a photo that's showing the ends of the tassels? And does the back of the piece look any different than the front?

I did something vaguely similar for this project.

What I did was use icord, but I had to create a segment of icord for each tassel separately, and then once I had them all created, I knit across the top of all the open stitches to join them up into the scarf. When I got to the other end, I worked each group of four stitches separately into icord again.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:02 PM on October 16, 2015

It's hard to tell the structure of the "tassels" from that pick, but if when viewed from the side they are kind of like a tube of stitches (as opposed to being obviously flat single stitches), then I might look into tutorials for an I-cord fringe cast-on.
posted by sparklemotion at 4:03 PM on October 16, 2015

I was going to say that because each tassel looks like a separate color rather than just an extension of the knitting, it could be surface crochet applied to the knit fabric rather than icord, but that seems less likely for a commercial scarf.
posted by Diagonalize at 4:13 PM on October 16, 2015

Hmm. It is straightforward to knit a scarf lengthwise and get this effect, as in this pattern. A bit different from your sample, though.

This doesn't look like either crochet or i-cord to me -- the ends are definitely cut. I wonder whether the knitter bound off the stitches between the ribs and then continued knitting, inserting yarnovers to hold the gaps, and then just trimmed off the last row that would have connected everything.
posted by apparently at 4:31 PM on October 16, 2015

The tassels are cut and loose at the ends (sorry, trying to take these one handed), they seem to be a solid block, the colour continues straight into the scarf, and both sides look identical.

I tried to count the threads entering / exiting each tassle, but I get a bit mixed up as I'm not a knitter myself. They have a sort of rectangular cross section, with two "v" columns on the front and back, and one on each side, if that makes any sense.

Icord is something we hadn't heard of, and it looks promising. You guys are awesome!
posted by lucidium at 4:34 PM on October 16, 2015

Yes, it looks to me like as the stitches are continued past the "hem", rather than being knit flat, they are closed up into tubes as icord.
posted by GrammarMoses at 4:37 PM on October 16, 2015

From the "solid block" picture, I think I see k1tbl (through the back loop), p1 across, and for the fringe knit i-cord tbl on each set of three stitches. That doesn't explain the way the colors go down a single column of stitches, though.
posted by mgar at 5:16 PM on October 16, 2015

What's disconcerting about the wider shot ("look identicals" link) is the way the colours are pooling and seem to match in both the fringe and the body of the project. If a row of knitting is across the scarf the way it looks like it should be, the yarn must be space-dyed to keep the colours in the right places. But then where is the yarn for the individual fringes coming from that it has sufficiently long colour repeats to do the fringes without effing up the overall colour patterns?
posted by jacquilynne at 5:20 PM on October 16, 2015

I think the whole thing might be crocheted in a slip stitch pattern rather than knit at all.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:22 PM on October 16, 2015

I'm pretty confident that it's knit by machine and the yarn is not space-dyed, it's different yarn colors stranded vertically in a way that would be a tremendous pain to do by hand. (I knit and also have a scarf like this and I stare at it every time I wear it.) The most reasonable way to copy it is the i-cord cast-on like sparklemotion and jacquilynne's examples.
posted by clavicle at 5:40 PM on October 16, 2015

I found the colouring absolutely baffling myself, but I chalked that up to just not understanding the construction. If it's a potential clue, the gradient is consistent over the whole length of the scarf.
posted by lucidium at 6:53 PM on October 16, 2015

I agree with @jacquilynne that it is crocheted stranded slip stitch. Look at this picture. Here's a pattern, only you'd do it long ways instead of short ways.

This pattern has a similar crocheted fringe.
posted by OrangeDisk at 7:42 PM on October 16, 2015

Since this is a commercial scarf I think it is a warp knit, which is a type of machine knitting in which multiple strands of yarn go up the length of the fabric rather than a single strand going back and forth across the width (as it does in hand-knitting). The zig-zag slant of the stitches is characteristic of warp knits. I don't think there's a hand-knitting analog of these warp knitting machines, sorry.
posted by Quietgal at 8:59 PM on October 16, 2015

If you really wanted to knit it and not crochet, it is possible. You would have to place all of your stitches on a holder and then work each tassel separately. If you did this, you could also bind off the end of each tassel, but it seems like a lot of work for very little return.
posted by donut_princess at 9:24 AM on October 17, 2015

So it sounds like the the scarf is probably machine knitted in a manner that would be a huge hassle to replicate, but there's a crochet stitch that lets you produce the same effect?

My mum hasn't gotten into crochet much, but this might be a good project. Thanks everyone!
posted by lucidium at 3:44 PM on October 17, 2015

Hey, it looks like somebody has figured this out!
posted by clavicle at 6:08 AM on November 4, 2015

Nice find, that really does look like it! Hopefully they'll write up the pattern, but it seems to confirm each "column" is a separate strand.
posted by lucidium at 6:50 AM on November 5, 2015

BOOM.

The pattern.
posted by clavicle at 8:48 PM on November 24, 2015