Knitted Yo-Yos

After my short and simple Tropical Scarf pattern, I'm back to normal with my new pattern which is sixteen pages long. They just seem to get longer and longer. To be fair, this one explains a new technique (well, new to me anyway) and then illustrates it with several sample projects. You can't do that in a couple of pages.

Knitted Yo-Yos

Fabric yo-yos (or Suffolk Puffs as they are traditionally known here in England) are gathered circles of fabric which are simple to make and can be joined to make lovely quilts. They are easy to sew by hand but you can also buy Yo-Yo Makers if you fancy a new gadget. 

Yo-yos make lovely scrap quilts but the circles can also be arranged into planned designs or appliqued to a background fabric. I particularly like this pattern from Kim Diehl's 'Simple Graces'. 

She also uses yo-yos to make a matching door hanger. I love her designs; she has a really good eye for colour.

These little circles turn up in toy patterns too. Jean Greenhowe calls these 'Rosette Dolls' in her classic toy book 'Favourite Dolls & Toys'. 

I bought my copy of this book years ago because I wanted to make her little doormouse tree trunk house for my daughter when she was little.

I wrote about this years ago; you can see pictures of the inside in this blog post.

There are various patterns out there for crochet yo-yos too which I have tried over the years. I bought Melody Griffiths' book 'Crocheted Throws & Wraps' purely because I spotted the Puffs Baby Blanket on the cover. There are some other interesting designs in this book too.

Isn't it nice?

I couldn't find links for any of these books so they are probably out of print but second hand copies would be easy to find, I'm sure.

Anyway, back to the knitting. All you need for a knitted yo-yo is a strip of knitted fabric with drawstrings at both ends. It took me quite a bit of experimentation to come up with a drawstring cast on that matched the one at the other end of the knitting. Instructions for this cast on which may or may not be new are in the pattern. I had a lot of trouble both trying to explain how to do it and taking the photos.

Once I'd sorted out the basic pattern I knitted lots of them, using some of my little balls of leftover yarn. Each one only takes about 2g of yarn and they're quick to knit.

After I'd worked out various ways of sewing the yo-yos together I knitted some different sizes ...

... and then several sets of flowers.

Can you spot the difference between the two pictures above? It turns out that you need the right number of petals if you're going to be able to sew flower yo-yos together to make a flat shape.

I also found that you can turn a yo-yo into a heart (with a bit of tricky sewing).

Next I had a play to see what I could make with my knitted yo-yos. First, inspired by Eric Carle's book, I made a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Like the Jean Greenhowe toys, he's threaded on to elastic so that you can shape him a bit.

I thought a more traditional project was called for next so I set about knitting lots of four patch blocks of yo-yos, using two shades of one colour for each block.

These were pretty but I thought they needed something more so I knitted tiny black yo-yos and sewed them into the middle of each block which really set off the colours.

Eventually I stopped playing around with them and arranged them into four rows of three and sewed them together, adding more little black circles in the gaps between the blocks.

What I love about this layout is the way the black circles turn into on point squares once they're sewn in place. There's a hint of the hexagon about the inner coloured ones too. All this is because of how the yo-yos are sewn together; you can play with it to achieve different effects. 

I hadn't got a plan for this rectangle but it turned out to be exactly the right size to go on top of my cross stitch workbox so that was a bonus.

I hope knitters will find this a useful pattern. You can download it here and I look forward to seeing some exciting knitted yo-yo projects. I might make a yo-yo bag next ...