Tubular cast-on

Now for the pay-off to the chained cast-on. It's tubular! The tubular cast-on is GORGEOUS for ribbing, and stretchy to boot. I have a new favorite...but it does take extra effort, compared to your standard cast-on. So let's check it out.

Tubular cast-on

With a waste yarn in contrasting color, cast-on half the number of stitches you need using the chained cast-on. If your pattern calls for an odd number of stitches, add one to that number and then divide by two. Switch to your main yarn. Purl one row, knit one row, twice (total of 4 rows):


You're ready to knit on the wrong side. My fabric is curling under in this photo, which is why it looks funky.
Purl one:

Yes, we know how to do that. Move on.
Now you're going to insert the right-hand needle into the purl bump from the first row. It's intermixed into the waste yarn. Here's where your contrasting yarn colors are key.

Purl bump is circled.
Insert RH needle from top to bottom (can also be described as from the front of the stitch to the back):


Place the stitch on the LH needle from bottom to top (back of the stitch to the front). Knit the stitch:

Two stitches successfully tubularly cast-on! That's a mouthful.
Repeat to the last stitch. If you wanted an odd number of stitches, purl the last stitch and you're done. If you wanted an even number of stitches, knit the last stitch, as well as the last purl bump. It will be a selvage edge, so it may be pulled fairly tight, and you'll have to work to get your needle in there. Here's what we've got so far:


Do a few rows of K1, P1 ribbing, then you can start to carefully take out the waste yarn. If you undo the last stitch cast-on with the waste yarn, you should be able to pull the rest out by tugging on the end (which is what makes the chained cast-on a sweet provisional cast-on). Check it out:


You'll notice that part of the waste yarn ends up in the tube you created with the cast-on. You can carefully pull it out. If you wanted an elastic band in your garment for extra pull on the edge, this is the ideal spot. You can thread it in post-mortem, or you can use the elastic as your 'waste yarn' if it is an appropriate shape.

And here's the finished product!


I *heart* this so much. It's gorgeous and definitely worth the extra time spent.

Chained cast-on

Back to our regularly scheduled tutorial. I hated this one as purely a cast-on, it's relatively ugly and difficult to do evenly. So why the hell would you want to learn it? Because it's a necessary step for the tubular cast-on, which is way cool and has nothing to with surfers or outdated 80's lingo, just an awesome finished edge. More on that tomorrow. But for now, brace yourself: the chained cast-on is coming for you. And it totally demands that you have a crochet needle similarly sized to the needles you plan to use. How presumptuous.

Chained cast-on

We start with our old friend, the slip knot. Situation normal, right? But this time, we're using waste yarn, in a contrasting color to the yarn we plan to use.


Place the slip knot onto the crochet needle.

Crochet needle in right hand, knitting needle in left hand. It's like a crafting yin and yang.

Hold the yarn in your left hand (along with your knitting needle) and make sure the yarn is running under the knitting needle to the crochet needle. Hook the yarn with your crochet needle, pulling it over the knitting needle:


Then continue pulling it through the loop on the crochet needle:


Tighten down the stitch by pulling on the yarn your left hand:

Voila! One stitch cast-on.

Repeat, starting with the step that begins "Hold the yarn in your left hand.." until you've cast-on the desired number of stitches.

Here's what it looks like after you've cast-on a few (not to be confused with tying on a few):


Now you can go ahead and use this as your cast-on, but I didn't do all of that work (crocheting is flipping hard, apparently) for a crappy edge.

Tomorrow: How are we going to use this to facilitate a super awesome cast-on?

CA to WI

The arduous journey from Berkeley (the Madison of the west coast) to Madison (the Berkeley of the midwest) is finally complete. I'm sorry for the blog hiatus, part of it was forced--there's no internet on the "Loneliest Road in America" in Nevada. It looks mostly like this:

BFE, NV

Other than the giant sand dune cleverly named "Sand Mountain":

Pile of Sand, NV

Southern Utah had crazy rock formations, sand, scrub brush, and more crazy rock formations:

Some Rocks, UT

A Gorge, UT

Colorado was snowy when we entered the mountains. It still remains my favorite state to drive through (until you reach the flat part outside of Denver, of course). I must have been so entranced that I forgot to take any photos. Sorry.

Then we entered Nebraska. Enough said.




When we started to get into Iowa, I started to feel like I was back home agaaaaaaain in Indiaaaaana:

Farmland, IA

Lots of farmland, but nice rolling hills to drive on.

A short jaunt through Wisco, and I was home. Then we unloaded the car, and unpacked everything right away. Ahahahaha, sorry, I couldn't even type that with a straight face. The apartment is a wreck, naturally.

I'm proud to say that some knitting was completed over the course of the trip, in fact, an entire deconstruction/reconstruction of the Infinite Cabled Hat:

Who's got two thumbs, speaks limited French, and has a kick-ass hat? This moi.

I'm actually going to give it to my friend in Oakland, who fed me many times while I was on my CA project. Here it is in all it's glory:

Love. It. Want one for myself.

But in conclusion, I'm just glad to be able to stop punishing my body with diner/fast food, and get back to punishing it with cheese and beer.

How many dpns?

I almost finished the infinite cabled hat prototype last night! Then I tried it on and discovered...it was too tight. The friend I was planning to give it to has a head that's a similar size as mine. Alas, so here I sit pulling the whole thing apart. Will this ever not be depressing?

But let's talk a little knit science. I took the hat prototype on my trip last weekend, and wouldn't you know it--I picked up the work, the yarn, and left the 5th needle behind. I figured I'd go ahead and work on it that way, although I haven't had the peachiest of experiences with four needles in the past. My first double pointed needles were a super cheapie Boye brand set, and only came with four needles in the first place. At that point I was unaware that a fifth needle even existed. So naive...I used them for a sweater sleeve and soon noticed that the point of transition between one needle to the other formed a vertical line of loose bars in between the stitches. A little searching on the internets revealed that this was a blight called a 'ladder'. My solution was to knit a few stitches past the transition point for each needle switch (so for instance, if there were 4 stitches on each needle, with the empty needle I would knit 4 stitches from the 1st needle, then 2 from the 2nd needle, and repeat this round and round so the transition kept moving 2 stitches to the left). This was, how do you say? A big pain in the ass.

Then a kind-hearted friend clued me in to that fifth needle, and life was better. No more ladders at all. It was like night and day. But why such a dramatic transition? Let's look at both configurations. What's the difference?

Sorry, an asterisk was the closet thing to a degree sign that I could get Gimp to do. Try not to be afraid of the specter of a hand coming out at you there.

Well, 30 degrees. If you think about how you typically knit, you probably hold your needles at nearly a 90 degree angle. If your needles are forced into a 60 degree angle instead (like in a triangle), the stitches on the ends are being pulled at an unnatural tension. Hence, the bars of yarn between the stitches get pulled loose. What's the moral of the story? Splurge for the fifth needle!! Trying to knit the hat with only four brought this lesson to the forefront of my mind. Never again.

Knit bind-off: last stitch boogaloo

The last stitch of the knit bind-off tends to look a little funky, so what the hey-diddly-do can you do about it? Read on.

So you've bound off all of the stitches but the last one. You've got one stitch left on the right-hand needle, one left of the left-hand needle:


Slip the stitch on the LH needle to the RH needle purlwise (meaning the tip of the RH needle goes though the stitch from the top to the bottom, can also be thought of as from the back of the stitch to the front):

Both stitches are now on the RH needle.

With the LH needle, pick up the loop just below the stitch from back to front:


Now slip the last stitch on the RH needle back to the LH needle, purlwise again:

Two stitches on RH needle, one on LH needle.

Knit the two stitches together:

Two stitches left.

Then bind-off the second stitch as per usual. Break the yarn, allowing at least 6 inches for weaving in the end, and pull the yarn through the very last stitch:


Pull it all the way through and tighten it snugly.

Voila!

The last stitch looks cleaner than if you had just pulled the yarn end through it without the other rigmarole, since it isn't just tightening in on itself anymore.

I love this little finishing tip to prevent an odd looking last stitch. It's just another one of those things to make your work look more professional (not that I don't already know you're a pro)!

Sun in the rainy city

A dude with a heavy accent passing by my office just remarked to his friend, "Because, I mean, a bird in the hand is worth two bushes". I just needed to share that with someone.

Moving on. Visiting the rainy city required air travel. I won't bore you with the details, but involved were a seatmate repeatedly getting up and down while somehow simultaneously oozing further over into my seat, a dude warbling off-key to his iPod, a woman with epilepsy, and a cat. I've provided the set-up, I'll let your imagination come up with the punchline. What could I do? I pulled out my sock materials (I was ready to start the second sock, finally) and tried to go to my happy place.

Here it is, my moment of zen:

From zero to sock cuff in one travel segment flat.

I realized that it made me feel better because I was at least controlling one aspect of what was going on. As in "That lady might be having a tantrum and delaying everyone's flight, but I can still make a hell of a sock!" When you think of it that way, it seems wrong somehow--but if knitting is a vice, I think it's on the benign end of the spectrum. I mean, I could have stabbed the lady with my knitting needles instead. I think that would have been worse (but maybe we could have taken off earlier).

Aside: One observation I've made consistently during my approximately bi-monthly air travel is that non-knitters are extremely impressed with double-pointed needle (dpn) knitting. The fact that five needles are in play must look intimidating or something. Oozer seatmate said "Wow!" when brought out my knit tools. He also later asked if it was going to be a sock for a baby, so I let him see the circumference and observed that it would have to be one big-ass baby. He agreed.

The airline experience was tempered by beautiful weather, skiing with the copilot (unfortunately, it wasn't cold enough for him to give the ski gaiter another test run) and a trip to a Seattle yarn shop called Stitches. It's a combination sewing & knitting shop, ~2/3 the former and 1/3 the latter. It's also next door to a sex-themed store, so you can do one stop shopping (because a bird in the hand is worth two bushes...if you know what I mean).

They had a wide variety of needle sizes in straight, dpn, and circular, but if you don't like Clover bamboo needles, you're out of luck (Clover needles are my favorite, so I was in lots of luck). They had a small yarn selection, but it was all good stuff, it spanned almost the entire Cascade line and offered many beautiful colors. They had some pretty sweet buttons too, but with no real need for buttons (and under the watchful eye of my copilot) I abstained. I did get some yarn for an idea that's been rattling around in my head for a new pattern, but I want to finish up the Infinite Cabled Hat (and possibly the South Face Hat, but I'm feeling intimidated by the two-color stranding after my lousy swatch) and get the pattern written up. I think I'm going to offer this one for free as well, since it was an easy design. I've been reading some forums on Ravelry about design, and it seems that some designers resent free patterns offered by hobbyists and people trying to get their foot in the design door. What do you guys think?

Picot bind-off

Now for the companion piece to the picot cast-on. The picot bind-off! I could find very little about the picot bind-off on the interwebs, and the picot bind-off that my trusty The Knitter's Book of Finishing Techniques describes is a method that makes a poor match for the cast-on I previously described. Like the cast-on, there are many variations of the picot bind-off. I've deduced a method using my math skillz that will be the most subtle of the picots and match the previous cast-on. And here she goes....

Picot bind-off

Step 1 - Cast-on one stitch using the cable cast-on:

A quick visual recap of the cable cast-on. See the above link for more details.

Step 2 - Knit two stitches:



Step 3 - Bind-off one stitch using the knit bind-off:

Up n' over, then drop the stitch off. See the above link for more details.

One stitch remains on RHN.

Step 4 - Knit one more stitch.

Step 5 - Bind-off one stitch using the knit-bind off. (One stitch remains on RHN).

Step 6 - Slip the stitch on the RHN to the LHN, inserting the LHN through the stitch from the bottom up:


You've bound-off one stitch using the picot bind-off! Repeat steps 1-6 until all stitches are bound-off. Basically what you're doing is adding one stitch, then taking away two. Here's what it looks like on k1p1 ribbing.


Nice and stretchy! Me likee.