right welcome to net on i'm sherri so koski as we open the show today i want to share a couple of items with you that are from a viewer i met her at a market she happened to recognize me and we got to talking and she brought some things and that she'd like for you to see and i'm going to share those with you today and there are a couple of things that she knitted for her children and grandchildren the designs are as wearable today as they were when she met them and she didn't enjoyed that that sort of work but i could see this on a child now just as easily as when jane made it it's a really great design very wearable and design that i think that would be great for a child because obviously as the child grows this isn't as size specific as as some designs might base that would be a great design to have in your repertoire because the child could really wear it for a long time so  poncho is really a great idea i think the other item that she brought in is a baby blanket and here again she's used a lot of different stitches there's a honeycomb stitch as well as some cable ing in there you can see and it's i would say more of an infant size or maybe a nap blanket for a toddler unfolding at the wrong direction excuse me so there is jane's baby blanket really adorable both in that traditional erin ivory color that we think of a lot of cabled garments and blankets being but of course knitting them in a bright color a red or a denim blue would be really great as well and sometimes that will make your item look a little more current you know taking that color selection a little different from the traditional makes it really more current and appealing but these are really great hand that items that jane shared  want to thank jane and they'll be left here for her to pick up and she will take them back and put them with her treasures for her family to have but i'm really thankful that she brought them in for all of us to see and to use here on the show if you'd ever like to do that drop things off here for me peters township you're welcome to do that and i'll feature them on the show you can leave me your contact information and then we can get them back to you and then the rest of the viewers can see them as well today we're going to be doing a lot of techniques i like to call this the so in the beginning and then after the break we'll be doing the end and we're going to be doing casting on and binding off because they are two very basic techniques but can really kind of make or break some of your knitted items so i wanted to go over some of the options that you have as far as casting on and binding off if you've been dating for a long time you might have a favorite and sometimes when we have favorites we get into a bit of a rut and you might have been using the same cast on for every kind of knitted thing that you have been doing and sometimes changing up your cast on or your bindoff can be more appropriate depending on what you're doing so we'll  talk about those things as well the most basic cast on is called a backwards loop and i've seen a lot of people do it who come to a class and maybe have had a little bit of missing experience  this is the one i think that a lot of grandmothers and mothers have taught kids all along starts with the slipknot which we all know and that's always our first stitch and the backwards blue generally is going to be worked off with your thumb and it wraps once around your thumb the needles going to go in underneath that loop and then the loop is tightened up on the needle i'll do it again for you it goes in over me and over my thumb and on to the needle this i will have to admit to you is probably my personal least favorite cast on it's extremely flexible which sometimes is a good thing having said that especially in a beginner's class i don't teach this one because it's very easily it gets away from you very easily if you drop that stitch you were it's really very difficult to get a hold but because it's completely dissolved it just goes away so i don't really teach this one if it's one that you're using on a regular basis you might think about using something else there are some really great cast on that might be more appropriate for what you are doing the other thing that i don't like about it is that because of that great deal of flexibility and stretch at the bottom is that it's more difficult to use that in a seam as well the one that i learned as an eight year old when i first started is called a long tail or a sling shot there again we're going to start with a slipknot and when i teach this one or when i used to teach this one i've actually changed the beginner's counseling that i've started using but i did use to teach this one and i did used to describe this to the kids as a tepee and indians t p pointed at the top and wider at the bottom and i always said to put the forefinger and thumb together and to put those into the tepee so those go in and the ring and little finger catch both of those strands at the pom try to get these so that we can get shots of all of these those two fingers are catching those in towards my palm and then we bring that back like a slingshot so here is the loop turn just a little bit for you here is the loop on my from the needles going to go in underneath that reach back on to the strand it's on my forefinger and pull it forward my thumb is going to come down and out of the loop and i'm going to tighten that down i bring that back into my slingshot come underneath the loop on my thumb reach facts for the strand on my forefinger drop it down tighten it up now this is the cast on that i have used for years and years and years for most almost everything that i have ever it is a nice solid base it gives you on the back the appearance of a pearl bump you can see on the backside you're getting that appearance of having like you would on the back of an that it's stitch that little bit of a b or if you're pearling that would be to your to your front obviously but gives you that appearance so it's a nice solid cast on it's great and the same it can sometimes be a little tight you would have to be careful with if you were going to use that say for instance around the bottom of a sleeve that you might push up it might be a little tight at the top of a soft something like that you might find that you might even want to go up a size on your needle and then in the size needle that you need for your garment just to give you a little more flexibility and stretch in that edge where you've cast on there is one drawback to this is that you have to have pulled out  course to cast on the number of stitches that you need and that can sometimes be a problem if you are using a lot of stitches if it's a big project an afghan that's all knitted in one piece or something of that effect and you wonder well how in the world am i going to pull out and then if you aren't in order to know that i can get all of those stitches and the worst thing in the world is to do all that casting on and then run out of yarn and have to take it all back out and start on because nobody really likes to cast on it's not the fun part of what you can do is to use two strands in order to do that cast on i have brought it to do so that it's two different color so that you can see what i'm doing obviously if you're going to do it this way garment or your knitted item you're going to be using i would just pull off a really long strand of the yarn before unit snip it and then use that cut edge and bring it in again if we bring that in and i bring that down so that that little knot is down into my hand you can see that we can also do that with two strains it's a little harder on that first one to get things to tighten up because you're fooling around with the two but you can do that so that you can see i have two different strengths and so i'm using the green and the red together and that will make your life much easier if you're trying to use this cast on for something that has a lot of stitches it's certainly going to take  a lot of the frustration out of running out of out of your yarn so that would be the long tail or slingshot cast on what i call modified using two different two different strands so let's take that back out and let me show you the one that i now teach when i do children's classes i teach at a children's academy over unself fayette and we're coming up on that this summer in july and this is the one that i find really helpful when i especially when i'm doing beginners or children there again we're always going to start with our slip and it's called a knitted cast on and this one to me makes a lot of sense to teach with because once you get this concept you really sort of have the feel of netting so once you've got your cast on stitches you sort of know how to knit so what we do is we come into that first itch which was our slip stitch we're going to knit the stitch pull it toward us but instead of dropping the old stitch off of our left hand needle we're going to bring the new stitch up on to the left hand needle and tighten it down knit into the second stitch pull towards me to put up on to the left hand needle tighten it down so everything about this is the same as knitting except that i'm not just dropping off that left hand stitch i'm creating the next  one the kids that i teach i find this to be really effective for their purposes as far as learning the technique and this is something that they can really understand i actually think it's a little easier than the long tail because you have that slingshot concepts that sometimes is a little much for their hands and sometimes as beginners we really are kids all over again because it's something that we don't have any muscle memory for it's brand new we're not used to it and it's just as difficult for us sometimes to learn a new technique as it is for an eight year old so generally speaking you know what i can teach to an eight year old sometimes it's very helpful when i do adult classes as well so that is as easy as repeating that the number of times that you need for that project however and many number of stitches that you need and you can see on the back of that one as well you still get that pearl bump the way that you would with the sling shot it's a nice solid cast on it does have some flexibility to it although any cast on can be done too tightly this one does have a little flexibility to it not as much as that backward l where i find it to be a disadvantage but this one i like very much third one that we are going to do or actually this would be our fourth one i guess is very much like that knitted one except this is called a cable you do the same thing for your first two slipknot and then made it into the only change in this one and this is your cable cast on is that we're going to put the needle between the two stitches as opposed to into the last stitch that we created this is a little firmer cast on so you can see that if you needed something where you really needed that sort of firm and very very little stretch this would be the one that you might want to use and the only difference as i said is that that needle placement is between those two stitches as opposed to into but a really great technique to have well when we come back from a break i do still have a couple of cast on techniques for you and a lot more discussion on that as well as our bindoff option there are some really great ones that you won't want to mess up come on welcome back we have two more cast on to do they are both one side i think of as being a little more specialized in that they meet a specific need in your knitting techniques the first one is for something that you might be knitting that would be circular or from the inside moving outward and it's called a circular cast on of course that makes a great deal of sense since it's something that you're going to be doing on a round project and it sets you up so that you get very little opening at that cast on edge and sometimes that's a problem when you're casting on at that center or you know because you have you know some stitches there how do you then not have a hole in the center of your  knitting all of these techniques can also be found on nit picks dot com in their tutorials so if you need a little refresher after the show a specific technique you want to see it broken down a little better they have still shots of all of these you can check out and it picks dot com or e mail me and i can give you that link as well and what happens with our circular cast on is that we're going to set this up the cut and the tail is in my right hand with my needle it comes in and loops around my ring finger and my little finger and then the working arm which is running to the ball is up here between my index and my middle fingers and that is creating just a little tension on there so that it's not flopping around what's going to happen is that i'm going to come into this loop that's part of the loop that's right here on my ring finger going to be a contortionist here today to to be able to do these things for you i'm trying to get a good angle on here ok so we're going to go into that loop and reach back to the working yarn that's running between those two other fingers and pull it forward the second stitch is going to be very similar to when we do a yarn over it just slides over then i'm going to go back into the loop through the loop so you're alternating going through that loop and pulling a stitch toward you and doing a yarn over you're going to have to this is absolutely going to require you to do an odd number of stitches you cannot end with a yarn over stitch let me do a couple more of these for you and then i'll show you how this works as you distribute these onto a couple of double pointed needles see from that cut and i can actually pull that and tighten that down so that that loop that was around my ring and little finger then becomes very tight then those stitches can be distributed onto your double points which is what you're going to begin working on if you are doing a circular project that is starting at a point because circular needles are going to be too large at that point going to be doing this on your point of double points so once those are distributed obviously those first couple rounds are going to be a little awkward they always are but for things like lace shawls and other circular projects i'm lessening right now is really great option because as you can see gives you the option to tighten that tail down as much as you need to and not have a hole there in the center of your knitting the last cast on that i'm going to do for you is called a provisional cast on it's really useful if say for instance you're going to cast on and for some reason you're going to need to work in both directions you're going to need to cast on and knit and then for some reason come back and use those stitches again and it downward and some projects will have you do that the easiest provisional cast on to to use and this is the one that i do when i do a prisoner is to start with the length of this the the gauge of the stitches is really of no consequence because these are going to come back out in the end and you want to start with the and that was your finished end where you pulled the this is the end that i pulled through that last ditch so that this is eventual going to come back out and you want to start with that one because that way you can just rip this one back out and i'm going to come into the edge of that crocheted chain and it really is of no consequence how far down into that chain that you go a lot of times when i'm going to do a pick up and knit i always tell you not to come into just one strand because it'll stretch out since this is going to be taken back out eventually that really doesn't matter you can go down into just that first strand and you can see how i just keep picking up across that knitted chain and let me knit a row or two real quickly here and show you how about going to work because the beauty of this really is after there's a little bit of knitting is that you can take that provisional chain back out and have live stitches to work from so if this is something you know that needs to be knitted in more than one direction obviously that's going to be a much less obvious start and finish are up start on both sides because you're using live stitches both times i think this is probably enough for you to be able to see so then what happens is i pull that tail out and there again any kind of way stern is going to work it doesn't have to match your project because you're going to take it back out you can see that the four with it a little more than i thought i was going to i apologize but you can see how this is going to leave you w live stitches once the pink comes out one more i can show you so here's my live stitch which if i'm going to be knitting in the other direction i would then put onto whatever knitting needle i'm going to be using obviously i'd take all of that out and there is the live stitch that i would then go the opposite direction and that for the project so those are  cast ons again if you need a refresher on any of those those are available as a tutorial on that pix dot com they have some great techniques they actually have some other cast on on there as well that i chose not to do on the show today so some of  them i didn't really think that i would need quite as often but you know something that you might be knitting you might be required to do use some of the other cast ons that they have on their website it's a great place for you to always to get some new techniques and to find some things out when you know if your knitting in the middle of the night and your local with yarn shop is close that's the place to go is the internet these days so i will go ahead and do some bind offs now because obviously at the end of your project you're going to need to bind off and what i've done is i've done a little bit of knitting on a couple of different sets of needles some will be doing a couple of different ones that would fulfill whatever needs your project might have this is just a little bit of seed stitch we're just going to do our regular bindoff on this and  all know a bindoff is going to be just a regular bind up is going to be two stitches coming over onto my working needle my right hand needle and then sort of leapfrogging each other this being sometimes what you're going to find is that they're going to say bind off in a pattern so what that means for you is that i'm going to do my seed stitch them going to have a pearl one very much like we played leapfrog as kids just think of that first stitch coming all the way over ok so that is our basic bindoff done in a pattern so if you were doing any sort of pattern where you had ribbing or something to that  effect that might be something that you need to keep in mind is to work those stitches as they would be worked in the pattern going to try to get to this pretty quickly we're running out of time i want to do techniques that's always the thing is how much time it's going to to take for things this is a three needle bindoff and we're going to put the right sides of two pieces together there's really just one extra stitched step to this in order to bind off and make a same at the same time we're going to come in and do our two stitches they're going to go through both sets of stitches so we're going to take the first it's from each needle and it's those second stitch from each needle  and then leapfrog so as that is accomplished you're actually creating a seam and to bind off at the same time if i open this up you can see we don't have much there we've only done two such as but you can see that there is actually since i've done that in two colors you can see that they are joined in the bind up which is really great for something like a shoulder same or something something like that where you need to have an even number of stitches the same number in the front as the back and bound off together it's a nice clean finish a very nice look on a sweater or something like that that you might be doing we have one other