Casting On

Casting on is the process of putting the first row of stitches onto one of your knitting needles. There are a number of ways to do this with both one and two needles. Both are very difficult to describe in words and pictures but here is an attempt.

This casting on uses 2 needles and is known as the 'knitted chain cast on'. This is preferred in general as the bottom row is nice and neat with loops at the bottom which are the same size as the rest o fthe knitting. This can make stitching pieces together easier, and looks neater in my opinion.

1) Make a slip knot on one of your knitting needles.

2) Put this needle in your left hand, hold the other needle in your right hand and push it through the slip knot towards the back.

3) Wrap the yarn around the needles and bring back through between them.

 In the  above photo the red yarn is wrapped behind the orange needle, then pulled in front of the orange needle and behind the blue needle.

4)  Pull the right needle (orange in the photo) back till the point just rolls under the blue one then push the needle back over the top of the blue needle. 

5) Pull this new stitch loose by pulling the wool through, and then loop this new stitch back over the blue needle.

6) This gives you another stitch. This process can be repeated until you have the required number of stitches to start your knitting pattern.

I will add more methods of casting on to this page, if you have any comments about the helpfulness or not of these pages please contact me at ambarann@live.co.uk