The Problem With Stripes

I love stripes.  There are so many things you can do with them.  There are so many ways to mix colors with them.  They're just fun.  With knitting though, there's a little problem with them.  Every time you change colors you have two ends:  the end of the first color and the beginning of the second color.  If you have a lot of stripes (like my current pullover), they can get out of hand pretty quickly.  In the case of my pullover, I have the added problem of jogs.

When you knit back and forth, each row sits nicely on top of the last one.  When you knit in the round, you aren't knitting rows, you're knitting one long spiral.  This means that at the end of the round when you change colors, the stripe doesn't end smoothly, it makes what's called a jog.  You can see it in the picture below in the upper stripes that haven't had their ends woven in.

The lower stripes have had their ends woven in and by weaving in carefully, I can essentially correct the jog.  I'm using the directions written by the designer for weaving in ends and making the stripes sit right.

Here's what it looks like on the inside:

When I weave in the ends, I duplicate stitch (from the backside) only on the color I'm weaving in and that helps adjust the jog.  It's not hard to do, it just takes a little bit of time, and flipping back and forth to the front to make sure I've got the tension right.  When I'm all done, I know it will be worth it because I'll have perfect stripes - lots of them!