#casting on

[purplbear]

Yesterday I realized I purchased the wrong weight red yarn for my rainbow hex afghan and so can’t continue with my next section.

Oh no!

Guess I must cast on the next sweater!

Darn.

What misfortune.

(Cackle cackle sparkling with glee and unicorn dust happiness!!!!)

[ub-sessed]

Do any of you have experience using the Italian cast on when knitting small circumferences in the round? I've tried 2 circs and magic loop, and every time I split the stitches between the needles, I lose a stitch.

[staticonthestratosphere]

the actual fucking audacity I have when doing a long-tail cast on and its ability to come back and bite me in the ass

“oH i HaVe EnOuGh tAiL tHiS iS fInE” and then immediate smiting from the gods

and it’s always off by an inch so then there’s the super-over-compensated second attempt

[tllgrrl]

I sometimes treat myself to something fun for my birthday. This year my car got some long overdue maintenance work, and I will be replacing tires next week. So this year, this yarn is my Fun gift to myself. (This, and a black t-shirt with the “Now I am become Death…” quote done in pink Barbie font.)

This is hand dyed 100% Merino wool yarn from a small batch dyer, and the minute I saw this colorway—inspired by, of course, BARBIE, and called “Ken-ergy”—it made me laugh.

I have two skeins, my plan is for another Framework Bralette, and it will be the brightest thing in my whole wardrobe. Eh-ver. This will be perfect to wear the time of year when it’s cold and sundown is at 4pm and I’m wearing all black everything…except this.

Just thought I’d share some bright on this cloudy rainy Monday here in the Desert.

That quote, BTW, is the inside of the label, and it’s true. As I’m knitting, each stitch ends up next to another color and they absolutely sing.

[clonerightsagenda]

I was rambling on the issue of museums and human remains and how certain populations are more likely to have their bodies put on display to be gawked at and then went "well I guess the Pompeii casts were of Europeans. there are bones in there right?" and Googled it to make sure, at which point I confirmed that yes there are bones in there, but more interestingly DNA testing revealed that a cast of an adult holding a child everyone assumed was a mother and child were, in fact, a man and a kid entirely unrelated to him. Honestly that's more moving to me. Maybe they were connected in a way other than blood, but maybe a stranger saw a child when the world was ending and thought the one thing he could do was hold them.

[twinliches]

nearly had a medical emergency today because - and i cannot stress enough how little i am making this up - a helicopter landed in front of an open grain silo while i was getting off my ship and i am deathly allergic to the wheat that said helicopters rotor blades proceeded to blast in my face at full force. the cosmic forces are plotting against me ass situation to be in

[rocktheholygrail]

oh? 👀

[hot-wire-this-old-car]

[victusinveritas]

[a-drama-addict]

not caring too much about a fandom’s favourite guy is the worst. you’ll think “oh i’ll look into the tag see if anything new and cool’s there” and it’s just that fucking guy again

[ub-sessed]

Garter tab breakthrough: knitting JMCO from the purl side

Tl;dr: After about 10 attempts at knitting the garter tab cast on, I finally discovered that if I use Judy's Magic Cast On and then start my garter stitch on the purl side, I end up with garter ridges that are actually tidy and alternate purl/knit properly.

Blah blah and more photos below the cut:

So I've never knit a shawl before because I don't wear shawls, but I wanted a bandana to wear at work in the winter, and I was way more attracted to the shawl patterns than the bandana patterns I found, so I figured it wouldn't be hard to just make a mini shawl and call it a bandana.

I knit a few swatches and figured out what adjustments I wanted for the bandana, but I just could not get the garter tab to look right. I tried the long tail cast on, the Turkish CO, Judy's Magic CO, all sorts of things. With a regular cast on, the picked up row would always be a mess, and with the provisional cast ons, there would always be a gap where there were two knit rows or two purl rows next to each other. I watched so many videos and read so many articles, and I couldn't figure out what I was missing. I began to suspect that it was not me who was missing something.

Stephen West, in his garter tab tutorial, says of picking up stitches from the CO: "There's no rules for this. Just get any three strands of yarn." And it occurred to me: Most shawls are quite large, knit with relatively fine yarn, and the garter tab is a tiny thing that gets lost behind your neck. Maybe people just don't care that much how it looks.

But I am knitting my bandana with DK, and the garter tab is going to be smack dab in the middle of my forehead. Any irregularities will be glaring.

Now, the yarn I'm working with is Bernat Softee Baby, which while it's very soft and pretty, is awful to work with: it splits like crazy, and is such a messy yarn that it can be hard to see what's happening. On top of that I'm knitting at a fairly tight gauge because I want a relatively stiff fabric. So when I looked at my many garter tab swatches, it was hard to see what was actually going on. So I decided to do a few experiments using a familiar aran yarn and much larger needles.

SWATCH #1: Long tail cast on

Immediately after doing my LTCO, I ran my Clover Circular Stitch Holder through the stitches so that I could be sure that I was picking up the right stitches. As you can see, this cast on creates a gap that has a couple random stitches in it.

SWATCH #2: Needle and hook crochet provisional CO

I followed instructions from Tin Can Knits, but even on my second attempt I had a really hard time picking up my provisional stitches. So I don't know if I did it right, but I ended up with what looks like a gap created by two knit rows next to each other, which is not what we want in garter stitch.

SWATCH #3: Judy's Magic Cast On (traditional)

Laura Nelkin has a great video on how to do this. But as is only logical, it results in two purl rows next to each other.

SWATCH #4: JMCO knit from the purl side

With JMCO, after you've cast on your stitches, you rotate your needles around soon that they're pointing to the right and start knitting. But what if you also flipped the whole thing over so that the purl stitches are facing you?

In the photo above, it looks like I have ended up with the same problem of two purl rows next to each other, but when I looked more carefully, I saw that there was a knit row between them, it was just tiny. I realized: Traditionally, when you start knitting into your JMCO, you're knitting into the stitch that was just cast on. But the way I was flipping things, that stitch was sitting on the needle cable, with nothing to keep it at the right size.

SWATCH #5: JMCO knit from the purl side more carefully

This time I carefully crossed my tail over the working yarn to hold the stitch at the right size before pulling my working needle out of the cast on stitches.

I found this much easier using a grippy needle and knitting Norwegian. I'm knitting the actual bandana on metal needles, but to get this cast on to work with the Softee Baby, I had to do the cast on with wooden needles.

I have no idea if this would work with other provisional cast ons. I'm just thrilled that I managed to puzzle it out, and that after months of swatching, I have finally started on the actual bandana!

[peliydoritos]

[a-flickering-soul]

what people need to understand is that ariana grande is able to pull off every single one of galinda's physical gags because that woman was in the comedy trenches of nickelodeon's victorious and anyone who was forced to show feet in front of dan schneider is walking away with a level of commitment to the bit that human beings were not built to perceive

[zytes]

this manatee looks like it’s in a skyrim loading screen

[sleevebuscemii]

there is still time never kill yourself etc etc