Showing posts with label 2tLTCO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2tLTCO. Show all posts

13 May 2015

Another great use for 2t-LTCO

This is a quickie post, as I'm busy getting ready for Saturday's Trunk Show (I keep thinking of "Dog Show!" from SNL when I type it):

A useful variant of the 2t-LTCO is for a provisional cast-on. Just tie your working yarn and waste yarn together as the two strands. Then place the waste yarn over your finger and working yarn over your thumb, working the long-tail cast-on from that position. The waste yarn should end up running along the bottom of your needle, while the working yarn goes over the needle top forming the first row of stitches. Remember not to count the slipknot as a stitch and pull it out when you work your way back to it on the first row/round of knitting. When it is time to put the stitches back on a needle and work in the opposite direction, just start pulling the waste yarn out of the stitches and popping those "live" babies onto the needle. If you have cast on a lot of stitches, I recommend cutting the waste yarn every once in a while, so you don't have to pull extreme lengths of waste yarn through the live stitches.

That's my advice for today. Hope to see some of you at Yarns in the Farms this Saturday :)

Thanks for stopping by, and happy knitting!
xoxo, Kathleen

22 April 2015

Video: 2tLTCO

How do you cast on when you have lots of stitches? Do you find yourself running out of yarn before you've cast on enough? Or do you end up with a long-long-long tail of yarn, when you only have that one precious skein? Me, too! Well, "me, too" before I unvented* the Two-Tail Long-Tail Cast-on (2tLTCO, for short).

2tLTCO is excellent because:

  • you won't run out of yarn
  • your yarn tail won't be too long
  • you won't have to measure or guess how much yarn you will need
  • when blending two skeins of yarn (hand-dyes, especially), you'll be ready to start alternating skeins right away


Next time you're casting on more than a handful of stitches, give this one a try, and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Thanks for stopping by, and happy knitting!
xoxo,
Kathleen

*Mother of modern knitting, Elizabeth Zimmermann, used the term "unvented" quite often as she turned her brilliant engineering brain to the wonders of knitting. There is no way I invented the 2tLTCO, but I have not seen it mentioned in any of the usual places. It grew out of the provisional LTCO that I like to use: Why not use the sameyarn for both strands of the cast-on? Ta-da! Ooh, I just realized it would be great for single-row stripes, too.

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