Tuesday Learn to Knit Day 2 - The Basics

Alrighty, so now you all have your materials and its time to learn to knit! Today I will show you how to Cast On (CO) and the basic Knit (K) stitch. (The letters in parentheses are the commonly used shorthand in knitting patterns, etc). There are many ways to cast on for a knitted piece, but today I am showing you the easiest, most commonly used method.

Ok, here we go:

To Cast On, first find the end of your yarn and make a loop.

Pull the tail end of the yarn behind the loop as shown

Take your needle and insert it through the loop from the right, behind the tail and out through the loop again on the left (a slip knot, if you will). Congratulations! You now have your first cast on stitch :)

To add more stitches, take the needle with the first stitch and hold it in your right hand, the yarn in you left hand and wrap the yarn around your left thumb from front to back:

Insert the needle in your right hand through the loop from front to back and slide off your thumb, you now have two stitches!

Continue in this manner until you have twenty (20) stitches on your needle.

Knitting:

Put the needle with the new stitches on it in your left hand and take your other needle (empty) in your right.

Insert the right hand needle into the first stitch (or loop, if its easier for you to envision it this way) from front to back through the middle.

take the yarn (which is behind your work) and wrap it around the right hand needle from the back, to the left and around the front to the right.

while keeping this loop on the right hand needle, pull the needle back through the stitch on the left hand needle the way it went in so that the right hand needle is back in the front of the work, and pull the stitch off the left hand needle.

Continue in this manner to the end of the row so that all of the stitches are now on the right hand needle and then turn it around (now all of the stitches are in your left hand and the empty needle in your right).

This week, practice your knitting and make this piece into a little square or rectangle (whichever you prefer) and next week I will show you how to bind off! Please let me know if these directions make sense so that I can improve my lessons throughout the year :) I wanted to do a video, but with my little camera, everything was so fuzzy it would be impossible to show you all :( so I sincerely hope that these photos help. And please feel free to share your progress, problems, triumphs, etc so we can all join in and help each other out :D