Casting on should be fun. It’s the start of a new journey - it’s getting in the car that’s going to take you somewhere exciting. Or at least it should be. Not to me, though. To me it’s time consuming and dull. You spend all that time casting on and there’s hardly anything to show for it. Then you have to count all your stitches, which I do two or three times just to be sure. Possibly that’s overkill.
A question of cast-on
Really, however, there’s much more to casting on than I realised. First, I thought you just learned a cast-on technique and that was you set for life. I was wrong. When I learned to knit, using Debbie Stoller’s fantastic Stitch n Bitch: The Knitters’ Handbook, I followed her method for casting on. It’s called the long-tail cast on and while it looks quite complicated it really isn’t. It also makes a lovely, neat edge.
I used my usual long-tail method to begin my lace hat. And it turned out that this was a mistake. The technique simply doesn’t have enough stretch in it for a hat. It took two attempts to work this out, of course, which wasn’t helped by the fact that I was knitting so tightly I was actually hurting my hands.
A new method was called for, so I tried the knitted method. As the name suggests, this involves knitting into the stitch that’s on the needle and transferring the new stitch onto the left needle. The resulting edge is lot looser and stretchier than that produced by the long-tail method, but it’s not as neat or nice-looking.
I’m not going to attempt to explain how to do the two cast ons I used here, but if you want to give them a go, head over to YouTube and do a search - there are loads of tutorials.
Blockheads
I don’t really get blocking. I mean, I get what you do, obviously. That’s easy - pin out the knitted pieces, wet them and leave them to dry. But I’ve never really understood why. I’ve blocked all my pieces and none of them have looked any different afterwards.
Pre-blocking. I was going to give up on lace after seeing this.But that was before I knitted lace. When I finished my hat, it actually looked a bit of a mess - holey, not lacy. Blocking is supposed to fix this, so I made sure I blocked properly. I pinned out that hat section by section, ensuring that each was fully stretched out, spritzed with water and left to dry. It took more than a week. But you know what? It was worth it. It’s now lacy, not holey.
Careful, section-by-section blocking. It took ages.Sew, sew
I don’t know why I dislike the sewing part. But everyone does, right? This should be the exciting bit. The knitting is done, you’ve blocked all the pieces and now you’ve just got to sew them together before you can wear your new hat/jumper/shrug/whatever.
But before I go any further, a word on weaving in ends. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given on this is to weave in ends as you go, so that you don’t have an overwhelming number of them to sort out at the end. I even did this once, and it really does help. So have I done it since? Of course not! The moral there is listen to good advice and keep on following it.
But back to the sewing. My theory on why we hate the sewing up so much is that we’re all worried that our terrible sewing technique is going to ruin our beautiful knitting. So we put it off and put it off until it becomes A Big Thing.
Time to let you in on a secret: sewing can be undone. You know how you forgot that yarn over four rows back and you’ve got to back to fix it? Sewing is just the same! Cut the thread and unpick it - no harm done.
It might take a long time, you might not be the best sewer in the world, but the more you do it the better - and quicker - you’ll get. And before you know it, sewing will just be very little thing.
I always think I’m rubbish at sewing, so I avoid it. But you know what? I sewed that hat up in about an hour, and you can’t even see the seam.
And finally ...
Remember that ‘Break yarn, thread through rem sts, draw up and fasten off’ instruction was concerned about? It’s easy! I left a nice, long tail to make blocking easier, and then just used a crochet hook to thread the tail through each stitch and then let it drop off the end of the needle. The long tail ensures that the stitches won’t fall off the yarn during blocking.
Once the blocking was done, I pulled the thread tight and sewed a nice figure of eight to secure it, and then used the remaining yarn to sew up the hat.
Hat in use! Lace is my new favourite.