How to Cast On in Knitting

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Kelsey. I’ve been knitting for ten years, and I’m a member of several knitting organizations. I’m going to teach you how to begin your knitting. This is called casting on because you can’t just start with your strand of yarn and your needle, you need to start with a row of stitches to knit. You do that by casting on. There are as many different ways to cast on as there are knitters, but the most common kind is the cable cast. You want to make a slipknot, and when you make your slipknot, you want to leave a long tail. A rule of thumb is to give maybe an inch for every stitch you want to cast on. This will give you way more tail than you need, but you can use the extra tail later for finishing, so better safe than sorry. I’m going to leave this long tail and make a slipknot, I’m going to slip it on my needle and tighten it. So I now have my first stitch, see that wasn’t too painful. So you’ve got the two ends coming off, you want to tail end to be away from you. You want to take your pointer finger and your thumb and stick them between the two ends like this, and then you can use your other fingers to grab on. You get a little something like this, then you bring it down. So now you’ve got this little double V going on. Take the needle point and you want to go under this outside strand here, go all the way around and go under this outside stitch and then bring your needle back through the original strand you went through like that. Then slip your fingers out and tighten. It’s pretty tricky, so I’m going to do it again very slowly. So I put my fingers through, keeping my tail end on the outside, I bring it down to get a V. I go under this outside stitch, over these two, under this next strand, bring the needle back through the original strand, slip my fingers out and tighten. That’s how you get a stitch onto a needle. It’s called casting on. "