Kind of need a knitting icon

[jamethiel]

I have a question. I'm getting seriously into lace knitting: I'm currently knitting the haruha scarf (v easy) and I'm thinking about trying a slightly more challenging lacy shawl.

I was clicking around on links today when I found this, which is a fabulous review of cast on techniques for lace. While I have observed for myself that your standard cast off/on is sometimes too tight for the airy-ness of lace and can lead to some... strange shapes in the finished piece, my question is this.

Invisible cast-ons leave live stitches once the temporary false cast-on edge has been unravelled. What do you then do with the live stitches?? Do they get individually sewn back into the pattern? Or do you need to have some kind of edge for every knitted lace piece you make? I'm a little confused.

Comments

[neotoma]

I'd only used the invisible cast-on for pieces that are going to have a knitted or crocheted edging. Otherwise sewing them down sounds very tedious.

[ginny_t]

If the instructions don't say to go back and pick up the stitches, I would recommend the backwards loop cast on. The first row after casting on can be a giant pain, but it's worth it.

[ct]

What neotoma said, pretty much.

Do you crochet? If you still want to use a provisional (invisible) cast-on and just don't like the look of an added edging, you can take care of the live stitches with something that's sort of a cross between a crocheted bind-off and a crocheted edging. Unravel the cast-on and put the live stitches back on a needle. Then, for every live stitch, sc (single crochet) in the stitch and then chain a few before doing the sc in the next stitch. You'll get an edge that's scalloped to varying degrees, depending on how many chain stitches you put between the single crochets.

[malka]

Generally you use them to knit in the other direction. For instance, I've seen descriptions of square shawls where you invisibly cast on for the border in the lower left, knit a long skinny strip of border for the bottom, then put the invisibly-cast-on stitches on the needle with the other stitches and work back and forth across the entire width of the shawl.

The one exception is that if you work K1 P1 on the row after the invisible cast on, I think it won't unravel. I'm not sure it's a nice edge, though.

[iamshadow]

My partner, who's an awesome amateur photographer, took a lot of photos of my Boye Needlemaster and Crochetmaster sets when they arrive, and made a bunch of icons from them, free to take with credit. They're HERE. Hope you like!