Fancy Cast On: Knit, Yarnover, Knit (kyok)

Hi there, I'm Corrina Ferguson for The Knitting Circle. In this video, we're going to learn a unique cast on that's perfect for lace shawls. I like to call it the fancy cast on, so let's get started. So what I'm gonna be showing you in this video is something that I call the fancy cast on, and I've used it in a lot of shawl patterns. I've even used it in like the neckline of a sweater.

And what it is, I'm gonna turn the work this way, so you can kind of see better, is it's a cast on that starts with a few stitches and increases rapidly and makes a really pretty edging. And, I call it the fancy cast on, I've not seen it elsewhere, but I realize that, of course, pretty much everything's been done in knitting. This is just one that I kinda came up with, but I'm sure other people have used it before and have a better name than fancy for it. But let me show you how we're gonna do this. So the fancy cast on is a modification of a long tail cast on, and the big difference is, the first thing that we're gonna do with this cast on is we're gonna cast on over both needles.

But to start our cast on, we need a slip knot. And, like I said, it's a modification of a long tail, so we're gonna pull some yarn out here and kinda scooch that over to the side. And I'm going to make a slip knot, wrap it over my index finger, so that I get a little loop that looks like this, and then I take the working yarn, and I pull that loop through the loop, and then you get a slip knot. I'm going to take both of my needle tips held together. If you're using circular needles or straights that have an end on 'em, it doesn't matter.

You just need to have both tips held together like this, so that you can put them together. So, we're going to insert both tips into the slip knot, and then we're gonna work a long tail cast on over both of these needles at the same time. And you just wanna kinda make sure, they're kind of synced up together. You don't want one a lot longer than the other, so that you end up with only using one at a time. So we're gonna do two needles at the time, but it's just a long tail cast on.

So we go under this, over this, and that's one, and we're just gonna do a few stitches here, two, and three, and four. And, I think we'll just do five here to do. Now, what you're gonna have is, you're gonna have the stitches cast on over both needles, and I wanna make sure that you know, this is not a stretchy cast on, it's an elongated cast on, so it allows the knitting to be accommodating of the extra stitches that we're gonna add on the next thing. But it's just nice and long. So to get ready for knitting the next thing, we're going to pull one of our needle tips out, and then you have your elongated stitches on your working needle.

So I've got these elongated, really loose looking stitches on my needle, and I'm ready to work into them. And the way that you work into them is, we're gonna turn every one stitch into three stitches. And this is the second part of the fancy cast on. And it's just a knit yarn over knit maneuver, but we're gonna do it all in one stitch. So we're gonna insert our right-hand needle tip, as if to knit, and we're gonna wrap, as if to knit.

We're gonna pull it out, but we're not gonna take that stitch off the left-hand needle, we're gonna wrap the yarn around our right-hand needle like it's a yarn over, and then we're gonna knit that stitch again. So let's see that one more time. We're gonna go into knit. We're going to bring it out, but not take it off the left-hand needle. We're gonna yarn over, and we're gonna knit again.

And we're just gonna do this knit yarn over knit, all the way down the line of stitches that we have. And that's what is the second step for the fancy cast on. Now, normally, after that, the next row that you're gonna do is a pearl, so let's see what it looks like after we do that pearl row. So we did our long tail cast on over two needles, and then we did the knit yarn over knit on the right side, and then I pearled back on the wrong side. And you can kind of see, how you get these little pretty clusters of three stitches.

It almost has like a flower effect, and, like I said, I kinda call it the fancy. But if we look at this, our actual little piece of knitting here, we can see all those little clusters of three stitches here along the bottom. And like I said, it's not a stretchy cast on, it kind of stays the way it stays, but we've elongated those stitches by casting on over two needles to allow for the rapid increasing that we did with those knit yarn over knit maneuvers. And the last thing that I wanna show you, now that we've learned how to do the fancy cast on, is what it looks like in the actual edging of a shawl. And this is my Longfellow shawl, which is a shawl that's worked from the top down in a crescent shape, and it starts off with a fancy cast on.

Thank you so much for joining me to learn to work the fancy cast on. Check out our website for more great videos.