Somethng new learned.

(Spike, it turns out to "share" the channel, I need an e-mail address. Gah. I didn't check to see how one went about sharing; I thought it was by Pandora ID, which seemed only logical to me. Also The Anonymous Channel isn't really lyric-less, but most of the lyrics are in languages I do not speak - I find I can't concentrate on other things if I can understand the words of music.)

Anyway. Last night I did (just barely) start the Ropes and Picots cardigan. Because I wanted something different to work on. (If I don't get the sleeves done - or close to done - for Potter this weekend, it'll be a toss-up whether I take this or Potter as my "big project" for over break).

And I learned something new. Because the sweater has a picot edge, you cannot merely cast on and start knitting ("One does not merely cast on into Mordor."?). With a picot edge, the standard way of doing it is that you cast on, knit a few rows, then do the picot row (a row of yarn-overs and knit-two-togethers - when it's folded like it's supposed to be, it makes a row of tiny points), then you knit a few more rows. And then you fold the knitting to make the picots.

One way of getting the fold to say is to sew the cast-on edge to the appropriate row further downstream (and I admit I've done that on things like hats), but it's a little messy and inelegant.

A better way is to do a provisional cast-on (one that you can take out later on and expose "live" stitches that you can knit to), and then knit those stitches together with the stitches they are to be joined to.

I have done a provisional cast on a few times, and always as the crochet method (you crochet a chain, use that to work off of, and then unpick the crocheted chain).

But this pattern recommended the "invisible provisional" cast-on (say that three times fast). You cast on over a strand of waste yarn, and the idea is, you can pull that out later and get "live stitches."

They had tiny drawings in the back of the Interweave issue as to how to do it, but...as much as I love Interweave Press for many things...their instructions on how to do new-to-you techniques often leave something to be desired. (Or, I don't know, maybe I need more explicit instructions).

I dug out my copy of the most recent book in the Stitch and Bitch line (I think it's "Superstar knitting"?) As much as I'm put off a bit by the name, and by the whole attitude that you need to be a Knitting Rockstar, the tutorials in the books are solid and the illustrations are more helpful than most.

So I managed to get the invisible provisional cast on done. It's tricky to do - you're having to weave your hands around in all kinds of strange ways, and I wound up taking several tries before I got stitches that held. My final result was not pretty, but as long as I can unpick it when I need to and knit those stitches with the other stitches, it will be fine.

(There's YouTube video tutorial (actually, there's more than one), but they do it differently than the way in my book. (And they call the waste yarn "auxiliary yarn," which I suppose is the "politically correct" term as you don't want to label a yarn a "waste"? But I find it more confusing).

(I'm thinking now, in the future, if I need an "invisible provisional" cast-on, I'm just going to cast on with waste yarn, knit a few rows with it, and then join on the yarn I need to have cast on provisionally - and just not anchor it. Then I can snip the cast on of the waste yarn, unzip the rows of waste yarn I knit, and get live stitches that way. A lot more straightforward to my brain, and it doesn't require any kind of hand-jive to make it work.)

(So does it still count as learning something new if you later on decide that there's a more straightforward-to-you way, so you won't do that method again?)