Tag: wip

Moebius cast-on experiments

I’ve spent all morning messing around with moebius cast-ons, and I ended up finding a technique that gave me a neat centre to work out from for my next double knit experiment. It is quite convoluted, though.

They look the same but I swear this is the front and back of my work

First, I tried just doing the normal moebius cast-on, the only one I could find when googling, except with 2 colours at once.

I hope you enjoy my pajama pants in the background, because there will be a lot of that

At first it seemed promising, the front of my work looked the way I wanted –

The back, however, got these weird loops around the stitches. They’re for whenever my yarns had gotten twisted together, and I untwisted it to knit the colour I wanted. I guess hypothetically this method would work fine, if you’re some kind of knitting master genius who manages to keep their 2 colours from ever crossing.

No :c

So, I figured I need a way to make sure my yarns don’t get twisted together on my needles. This is where it begins to get weird. I cast on each colour on a separate set of needles, and then knit them together onto my main needles.

Red is main, and green is temporary aid. I did not notice at the time that the stitch markers are too big to stay in place on the green set and are sliding all over the place

I knit them together, knitting the red and purling the green.

Purl in front. On my first try, the ones getting purled were in the back, and everything was chaos.
I don’t have 2 sets of needles the same gauge or length, so green is smaller and thinner. My tention is always too weak on my purls anyway so it works out.
The useless end of the green needle going along for the ride. It stays with the beginning of the round.
Also if everything looks weird and backwards it’s because I’m left-handed (or because I knit continental, if you’re used to seeing the other kind)

Everything worked out until I finished the first round, and it was time to do the stitches that had previously been the bottom row. To get the moebius twist, the purl colour has to go to the back now. This means that instead of moving the yarn to the front for purls and to the back for knits like one normally would, it moves to the middle of the two needles for purls. It got pretty tight in there but it’s doable.

I did eventually realise that I don’t need the loose end of the short set of needles to be in the middle there. It did get trapped inside my first 5 or so stitches before I realised what I was doing. Also, of course I didn’t notice at the time that my headphone wire was in the picture.

I tried to take a couple of pictures to show how the purl stitch is done, but also I’m not a very good photographer (or blogger. Or knitter. Or explainer, as I’m sure has become abundantly clear by now)

This is why I’m not a photogrpahy blog
Oh yes I understand perfectly now thank you
Featuring the end of the bonus needle, dangling hopelessly out of the beginning of the round

I was going to end with some pictures of the end result, but I only have 2 rows done so far and I already put those pictures on the top of this post. Sooo, um, the end?