Silk, Alpaca and Green

Posted by: Nanette's Needles on: March 21, 2011

• In: Knitting | Shawls | Yarn
• 2 Comments

I’ve decided that assembling the shrug will have to wait awhile. I’ve been dying to work with the silk/alpaca lace-weight yarn I bought late last year. So I cast on 363 stitches – twice. Do you know how long it takes to cast on 363 stitches? I’ll tell you. It takes a loonnnngggg time.

Casting on is normally not a problem for me. It’s knitting that first row after the cast-on I find difficult and it’s hard enough in a DK- or worsted-weight yarn. I find it darn near impossible in a lace-weight.

After a few repetitions of the pattern stitch I was tearing the yarn off the needles and casting on again. This time I used the two-needle cast-on (I’ve also seen it referred to as the French method) where it looks like you’re knitting. But instead of keeping the new loop on the right-hand needle you transfer it back to the left-hand needle as the new cast-on stitch. It take a little longer for me to cast-on this way, but it results in a stronger edge and almost the equivalent of a completed first row. And that makes the actual first row easier for me to knit.

I was good. I cast on 363 stitches for the second time and I had every two repetitions marked with a stitch marker. (I didn’t have enough to mark every repetition.) I knit the first six rows and found it a little difficult to keep track of where I was through two repetitions but it wasn’t impossible. Somewhere in the first half of the seventh row I had to back up due to a miss-count but then I started forward again. Four repetitions later I saw the hole.

After I came back from the store with more stitch markers I cast on 363 stitches for the third time.

Tags: casting on, knitting, shawl, yarn