What Is Helical Knitting? Learn 3 Ways

What is often called “helical knitting” is a clever technique that allows us to create perfect, jogless one-row stripes in the round without carrying the yarns up the side. You can use as many colors as you like, making this a great technique for using up precious leftovers.

There is only one rule: The working yarns never cross.

Let’s say you were working with green and blue, and you work the first stripe all the way around in green. Then, you work a stripe in blue. As long as the green yarn never crosses the blue yarn’s path, all is well. It works this way because knitting in the round actually creates a spiral, rather than rows with a beginning and an end. Both the green and blue are spiraling upward, following their own path parallel to one another.

Helix means spiral, so, technically, all knitting in the round is helical knitting. If we are working with two colors, we are knitting a double helix! Where might we see that in nature?

Two colors knitted in the round can spiral around one another just like the double-helix structure of DNA. Illusration by 19eli14 via Pixabay

Just like the double-helix structure of our DNA, you can imagine our green yarn and blue yarn moving along the same path but never intersecting, creating two perfect spirals. Brilliant! While this technique can be used for any knitting worked in the round, it’s become popular for socks. As I was working on two different sock designs lately (Wanderlust Socks at the top of the page and Cymru Socks shown below) that incorporate helical knitting, I’ve been playing with different ways to manage my stitches. Let me show you three ways and when I find them most useful.