Asian Tiger

Seattle weather is back to summer normal! Check out our expected highs this week:

TODAY...MOSTLY CLOUDY UNTIL MID MORNING THEN MOSTLY SUNNY. PATCHY FOG THIS MORNING. HIGHS IN THE 70S TO LOWER 80S.

INDEPENDENCE DAY...MOSTLY CLOUDY IN THE MORNING THEN MOSTLY SUNNY. HIGHS IN THE 70S.

WEDNESDAY...MOSTLY CLOUDY IN THE MORNING THEN BECOMING PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGHS IN THE UPPER 60S TO MID 70S.

THURSDAY...MOSTLY CLOUDY IN THE MORNING THEN BECOMING PARTLY CLOUDY. HIGHS NEAR 70.

Oh happy days. I ought to have taken advantage of the lack of heat to work in the yard, but I didn't do much outside. The Nerd had a friend over and I made them do a half hour of weeding so something was accomplished in the battle of good vs evil flora.

Instead I reskeined some of my recent dyeing. I don't love the blues but the orange one turned out great. It matches the colors of our marmoleum called Asian Tiger. (Hard to tell with my lack of mad photography skillz.) I hadn't intended this skein to match the marmoleum. In fact, I dyed a skein a couple weeks ago that was supposed to match this wonderful flooring but it came out completely different.


More on Casting on.

I agree that long tail is a great cast-on. I see two disadvantages though. First, when casting on a whole bunch of stitches, like when making a seamless sweater, it is really hard to judge how much yarn to start with. Second, it ends up looking like a purl row, so if you are starting something with a garter stitch border, you get a stockinette-ish row on the edge.

Crochet cast on looks just like a bind off edge and just like the slip-stitch garter edge, so it is (according to Sally Melville) the only cast on that can make all four edges of a garment look exactly the same. She uses it for casting on for garments knit sideways. You cast on for one button band edge and you cast off at the other, so you want them to look alike.

Susan likes that long tail is stretchy and that it is easy to make the stitches uniform in size.

Well, I find that a crochet cast on is also very stretchy. If I cast on to a needle one size bigger than used for the item, I can make the stitches really tight and then they are uniform in size. (Actually, that's the only was I can get long tail to be uniform also). Erika's and Nancy's comments make me wonder if we are talking about the same thing. Nancy, I am talking about casting onto the needle, by making a crochet chain that loops onto the needle as it is created. Just slightly more tedious than long tail cast on. And Erika, I also have a terrible time knitting into a crochet chain. All those instructions for provisional cast on where you knit into those "bumps" on one side of the crochet chain? forgetaboutit, I can never get that to work. But by crocheting the waste yarn right onto the needles, everything is already set up for you. You can't make it look like crap. (well... you know what I mean) So why don't instructions for provisional cast on mention this trick?


Here's the beginning of my Cinxia. Speaking of slip stitch side edges, this sweater doesn't have a button band, so the edges have to look nice. As far as I can tell, the best way to make a nice side edge is to knit the last stitch of every row and purlwise slip the first stitch. But the Cinxia instructions muck this up, having you purl the last stitch of each wrong side row. I tried this on a swatch and it made one side look wonky. So on my sweater, I am knitting that stitch and getting the nice edge I wanted. Funny thing though, given that there was a knit along blog and a yahoo group devoted to this design, nobody mentioned this issue. Makes me wonder if there is a way to make a nice slip stitch edge when the last stitch was purled and I just don't know about it.
One other thing I learned. When I started knitting, I was wrapping the yarn around the needle the wrong way -clockwise- and my stitches were all twisted. When I asked about this at the LYS, they said it looked like I was knitting through the back. So when swatching for Cinxia, I tried both ways, knitting through the back (which the design says to do) and knitting through the front but wrapping backwards. To my surprise they were not equivalent. Both end up with twisted stitches, but they don't look or act the same.