Knitting Lesson Pre #1

Casting on.  How many ways to cast on?  Let me count the ways.  No not really, there's too many of them!!!  lol

I used to cast on by just bringing the working yarn through a crossed loop strung between my forefinger and thumb.  Then when working that first row, the length of yarn between stitches kept getting longer and longer.  And longer.  I had no idea why.  So I would just go on with it, then use the excess tail to make more stitches when I reached the end of what was cast on.

Then I met a lady at work who did BEAUTIFUL knitting, and since I'm a crocheter, we struck up the conversations about yarning.  I was working on a scarf for a Christmas present that was being done with knitting, and got the brilliant idea to ask her why I kept getting such big gaps between my stitches on the first row.  That was how I learned to do long-tail cast-ons.

But I had no idea how to estimate the length of yarn needed to get started when doing long-tail cast-ons until I took Galina's knitting class at the conference in Manchester, New Hampshire last month.  She covered this exact thing by saying that whichever body part was to be the start of the knitting, you would loosely wrap the yarn full circumference around that body part, then pull off approximately 3 times that length to start the cast-on with.

So I tried exactly that when I started this jacket, and I was so proud of myself!!  When all 254 stitches were on the needles, I had a leftover tail of about 12"!  I could live with that quite nicely!!  lol