When I learned how to knit, the long tail cast on was the one that I had been shown. And for almost 30 years I had been blissfully unaware that there was another zillion of cast on methods.
Despite my then following ignorance of the qualities of some of the other methods (cable cast on or provisional come to my mind), I still use the long tail cast on for 99.9% of my projects as I find it strong and versatile. It is supposed to be done over two needles which makes it very stretchy, great for those lacy or stretchy projects, but if I want it a bit less loose (or if I am working with ridiculously big needles) then I will just use one needle.
For this tutorial, I have only used just one needle as I find it easier to get started. Once you understood the movement, you can do it over two needles.
I made this tutorial for my knitting class which is a mess healthy combination of English and continental knitting so it might look slightly weird to those of you who have learned knitting the continental way (considering my observations lately, it might actually be a German way rather than a continental but that is how it is called).
One last thing before we get started. Please remember that these pictures have been taken 3min before the all important football match. We will see if I will ever get the chance to replace them with better ones.
But for now, lets use what we have:
1. Make a slip knot with a long tail end (the length of the tail will depend on the amount of stitches you will need) and put it on the needle. Hold the needle in the right hand, open the two tails up so they form a V- shape, the tail end comes towards you, the ball end goes away from you.
2. Slide the thumb and index finger of your left hand into the gap between the two strands and open the gap up a little bit.
3. Grab the two strands with the remaining three fingers and hold them tightly.
4. The needle with the slip knot should now be positioned between your thumb and your index finger. The tail end goes over your thumb (thumb strand), the ball end goes over your index finger (index strand).
5. Pull the needle down so the thumb strand forms a full loop around your thumb.
6. Slide the needle from bottom to top through the thumb loop…
7. …grab the index strand and pull it through the thumb loop.
8. You have now a new stitch on your needle. Release the thumb loop.
9. Push the thumb strand down with your thumb to tighten the stitch but do NOT let go of the two strands.
Start again from Step 5 by bringing the thumb up again and pulling down the needle. If you are working on a small scale with small movements, this will result in a smooth circular movement of your thumb and you will not have to set up everything from scratch.
As I have mentioned before, you should do this over two needles held together. You will pull one out once you have finished the cast on. This will result in a very stretchy cast on, ideal for something that needs to be stretched out.
I have gone all quiet since the holidays mainly due to a lack of inspiration…. which also resulted in two rather lukewarm scarf projects. Don’t get me wrong, the patterns are both lovely, I have used beautiful yarn in both cases, but I’ve got the sizing wrong and it is just not quite right for me and my neck. So I am thinking of finding a new home for them. A bit like Edith Klinger’s Wer will mich? for those Austrian readers 🙂
So, first of all, we have a lovely Trillian by Martina Behm – a narrow, slightly asymmetric triangular shawlette with an eyelet border in a luxury silk/merino yarn by Dye For Yarn in green tones. It is about 190cm long and 30cm wide at the widest point.
The problem I have with it is that it is not quite big enough (because I had much less yarn than suggested). Wrapping it around my neck only once, leaves long ends, but wrapping it around twice is not quite possible. Especially as it is asymmetric.
The other lovely shawlette looking for a new home is a Lintilla, again by Martina Behm, again a slightly asymmetric, rather narrow triangle but with ruffles instead of eyelets. I have used a gorgeous bluish green 100% merino wool by Wollmeise but it is as well slightly too short (or too long, depending how often you want to wrap it around your neck). It is about 195cm long and about 26cm wideat the widest point.
So, if you think that you are the right person to take care of one of these (or you know a person who would be able to offer one of them a good home), please leave me a quick comment, explaining why you are the right person and I will be happy to post it to you.
If there is more than one person interested in one of them, random.org will have to decide.
And if you are wondering why I keep knitting too small things: I guess it was a deadly combination of lack of commitment, lack of patience and lack of a good kitchen scale to wait for the right moment to start the end sections 🙂
After such a long break, the start of the new school term is a good time for me to take things more seriously again (I have already, just a bit behind with the posting). I guess I am still a teacher, going from september to september rather than january to january 🙂
Just a quick picturesque update on the window yarn bombing. Somehow I am not as quick as I thought, slowed down by all sorts of things, visitors staying, possible bronchitis in combination with stiff neck, children refusing both to cook or going to nursery by themselves,….
Anyway, there is still lots to do but this is how far I got:
I put the vase up first and left it empty for a couple of days so people passing and eventually noticing it could wonder what on earth that thing would mean.
The initial plan was to add one or two flowers each day but as I said, I am producing them much slower and I am nowhere near the end. There is still lots of space for more….
And as my daughter suggested, there should also be a bee and maybe a butterfly. I really like that idea and will definitely add them.
Some of the flower pattern I found at oddknits, others are variations of something that I had seen in a book ages ago.
I also want to pick up crochet again and add some crocheted flowers, so far only some of the stems and leaves are. I kind of used the tutorial at the twisted yarn but without actually knowing English crochet vocabulary … so I might have gotten it totally wrong. They still look like leaves though.
I am very pleased with it so far, and I hope it cheers up people who pass, especially those who continuously mistake our house for the dentist next door 🙂
but considering the slow pace I wonder if I will ever get to do the two other, much bigger, windows.
After a rather beautiful but actually not quite summery 3in1 I wanted to knit another jumper for myself. I really liked the Rowan Savannah – a cotton and silk blend in really nice shades – and was looking for a pattern. To be on the safe side I decided to buy the Rowan Summer Textures booklet to knit Navajo – a pattern designed for that yarn. Now, the pattern itself would probably be worth its own post but lets just talk about my mistakes for now.
First of all, I realised quickly that the jumper would be far too short for my liking so I ordered another two balls which were obviously from a different dye lot and very even visibly different from the others. I decided to knit the ribbed parts at the bottom in the new dye lot so the colour change would go hand in hand with pattern change and therefore be less obvious.
That worked really well. Until I reached the rather hidden section of the front – chest height – where I confidently checked the ball numbers. And took the wrong dye lot to continue.
Can you spot the line?
Once I realised that I had only balls from the same dye lot left, I could easily see where I had gone wrong. On the picture it is hard to spot but you can actually see a line just under the top zig – zags and one would be just under my chest – another classic example of me not only making an easily avoidable mistake but also whilest being fully aware of a potential source of errors.
But all that nothing compared to my other, in the end rather useful, ahem, lets call it creative interpretation – the mystery of yfwd (yarn forward round needle)and yrn (yarn round needle)…..
When I started using English (as in the language spoken in many countries all around the world) patterns, I came across YO (yarn over) first, found out what it meant in German and did it. Later I came across Ysomething and found out that it was YO in English (as in the Pimmsdrinking teasipping country I currently enjoy living in) knitting.
Now, when knitting the Navajo, I suddenly realised that both terms (yfwd and yrn) were used. Which might possibly mean that they could be two different things. So I googled and watched a tutorial on youtube.
I watched it without sound as I did not want to attract my two lovely children who would have taken that as an invitation to watch a series of nursery songs on youtube. And I stopped at 1.45min. Obviously there was no need to watch the remaining 3min or listening to the accompanying explanations ….
So for all those who know what yfwd means, go to 1.35min and watch without sound for about 10 sec …..
After this amazing revelation (If I had listened to the accompanying explanations OR watched the rest, I might have realised that this was the “how not to do it” part), I incorporated the “new” technique in my knitting (I had to do it about a zillion times only) and decided to not only write a post about the YO mystery in English knitting vocabulary but also to create some kind of tutorial.
After I had found the brilliant Let me explaiKnit I gave up on the own-post-idea as it is all there anyway but I still wanted to take pictures of the differences, knitted a few samples, consulted my knitting book for some reason and realised ….. there are NO differences. I mean the result is always the same. The Ysomething goes from the front over the (right) needle to the back. There is no need for a yfwd, a yrn and a yon. If you still want to know, check out Let me explaiKnit!
This is now a serious question to all those English knitters, please correct me if I am wrong, because I might be missing something that comes natural when you knit continental style?
Are not all three basically the same? No matter if you are between two knit stitches, two purl stitches or a knit and a purl stitch, you start with the yarn in front (so yes, if it is initially at the back you need to bring it forward), you put it over the right needle to the back and you continue with whatever you need (which might mean that you need to bring the yarn forward for the next stitch).
As much as I appreciate the attention to every single step when describing those three techniques, I do wonder if it doesn’t make things more complicated than they are if you are actually splitting the YO into three different ones. Anyway, back to my jumper and the amazing new technique.
Let’s call it YOB – yarn over backwards
Maybe this technique existed already under a different name but I did not actually come across it. So:
This techique is incredibly useful, if you are supposed to k2tog first and next a – lets call it neutrally – YO which will then both purled together through the back loop (p2tog tbl) in the next row.
It is especially useful if the recommended yarn is a pain to knit (cotton fibres with one silk thread wrapped around to hold it together) and makes the p2tog tbl virtually impossible. And lets say that you have to repeat that p2tog tbl to the end of row and for about a million of rows. Then the YOB comes in really handy.
All you have to do is to bring the yarn from the back over the right needle to the front (rather than the other way round)
revolutionary YOB:
yob
yob when finished
yob on the wrong side
compared to traditional YFWD:
yfwd
yfwd finished
yfwd on the wrong side
When you are on the wrong side of your work and have to do the p2tog tbl, the newly created loop leans actually the other side which makes it so much easier to get through both stitches from the back.
I honestly would not have knitted that whole jumper if I had not accidentally invented YOB. Before checking out the differences of yfwd and yrn, I had done it correctly and it was a fight to get the needle through. It was as if I had never knitted before and each stitch was difficult to form. I would definitely not have done that for such big sections.
I have also knitted two samples of the ribbed section, once with yfwd and once with yob, to see the differences.
Once they were knitted I could not see any, when I stretched them out, I would say that the bottom one (yfwd) is actually a bit neater.
I tried again with a plain cotton yarn to see if that would make any difference. P2tog tbl with one of the two stitches being a yfwd created in the previous row is still annoying but not as fiddly as with the Rowan Savannah and it is still a bit neater.
Yob again on top, yfwd at the bottom.
So, when opened up, there seams to be a difference in regularity (probably because there is no flow whatsoever when doing the purl row of the yfwds and you have to work hard each time) but I don’t think it makes any difference in the actual jumper.
So as a conclusion, yob turned out a very useful mistake, as the p2tog tbl is certainly much easier to be executed and I can only recommend it for this particular project. I do however wonder if this is really the only way to get this bold ribbed look or if there would have been a much simpler way for a similar effect…. but that is a completely different question.
Atelier Oursonne 