Every stranded knitter eventually develops their own philosophy regarding their stranded technique, especially when it comes to float tolerance. I’ll tell you my philosophy used for managing my bears. Please don’t think you have to do what I did, but hopefully, you’ll find something helpful among my following tips:

Don’t strand too tightly – always leave a tiny bit of slack in the strand.

Don’t catch long floats too frequently. Snagging long floats is not much of an issue with hats, since we don’t run our fingers through them. And when a hat is knit out of Shetland wool, there’s even less concern about snags, since the wool felts to itself. Floats under an inch long will never be a problem with such a hat. But, those bears are indeed extra long, and after all that work, I want them to live extra long “lives”.

Although I tend to allow some pretty long floats, I caught the floats at a few points on my bears. I tried to do it so that any resulting indentation at the catching point would occur along a naturally occurring line on the bear, if he* were more of a line drawing than a solid-colored fellow: the neckline, shoulder line (behind & above the front leg), the hip line (in front of and above the hind leg – see below.) Where possible, I staggered those catch points, too, so that I avoided having the catch points stacked up directly above each other on consecutive rounds – stacking them really makes them show up far more obviously. * (My bears, like my children, are boys – yours may differ!)

Hope that helps!

Mary Ann