I-Cord Cast On

Hey there, Mary Beth Temple here. And in this video for the Knitting Circle we're going to learn about the I-cord Cast On. Now I love I-cord as a finish for items like jackets, sleeve hems, and neck lines, and all that kind of stuff. But did you know you could cast on from an I-cord? We're gonna learn how.

Let's get started. For regular I-cord you are always encouraged to use double pointed needles, or a really short circular because you're sliding the stitches from one side to the other. But for the I-chord Cast-On we're actually going to move them physically from the right-hand needle tip to the left-hand needle tip for right-handed people and vice versa for left-handed people. So I'm just using a circular needle because that's what I use for everything. So I'm going to put my slipped on on the hook.

I'm gonna cast on three more stitches using a longtail cast on. Two, three, now I'm doing this with four stitches involved in my I-cord, you could use three or you could use five, a lot depends on the weight of your yarn and the look that you're after. So it doesn't have to be four. It's just four is the most common. And so that's what we're working with here.

So again, instead of moving my needles to the other side of the DPN, I have physically shifted them over to the other needle, and you'll see why in a minute, but I want to make sure my working yarn, which as you know is the yard that's attached to the ball of yarn as opposed to the tail, which is the cut end. I want to make sure that my working yarn is over on this side. So now in my first stitch, I'm going to KFB which is knit front and back, which is an increase. So I'm going to knit in the front. I am not going to push it off the left-hand needle.

I am going to knit in the back leg of the same stitch and then I'm going to push it off the left-hand needle. So I've had an increase there. I've gone from one stitch to two. Then I'm going to knit the next three. One.

Two. Three. So I had four loops and now I have five, one, two, three, four, five, but I'm using four in my cast on so I'm going to move four back to the other needle. Remember we're not knitting them. We're not pearling them.

We're not twisting them. We are slipping them. So they go from one needle to the next, with no extraneous excitement. And then I'm going to knit front and back. And I'm going to give that a good tug because I want those stitches to curl around like a regular I-cord.

So you knit the front, do not push the stitch off the left-hand needle. I'm going to knit in the back leg of the same stitch. So I've turned one stitch into two, knit three, one, two, three. So now I have one, two, three, four, five, six. So I've cast on two stitches and I still have my four stitch I-cord happening down here.

So slip them over two, three, four. There's my two cast-on stitches, knit front and back and give this a good tug so it rolls around. There's one. There's the back. Knit the next three.

One, two, three. Woop, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So I'm going to keep doing this until I have three stitches more then the number of stitches I want. So I want a total of 10 stitches on my cast on just for the sake of ease. So I'm going to keep going until I have 13.

So you can see, I have my I-cord action going on down here. And again, for the sake of argument, I want 10 stitches. I have 13. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13. I'm going to put four stitches back on my opposite needle.

Two, three, four. I'm going to knit two together twice. There's one. There's two. Now I'm going to put those two stitches back on the opposite needle, knit two together one time and I should have ten.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. So you can cast on as many or as few stitches as you need with your I-cord cast on. Now what if I wanted to work in the round with an I-cord cast on and not straight like I did here. In that case, I would take those three of the four stitches and I will put them on a safety pin or a big locking stitch marker or a stitch holder, and I would just leave them aside, go on and knit my project as I would. And I would come back at the very end and I would graft those three live stitches to these guys at the very beginning so that I had a circular loop of my I-cord cast on and nothing would be amiss.

You wouldn't be able to see where it began or ended. So again, whatever project I'm doing, I'm just going to go ahead and knit this like I would any other cast on. There we are. There's my right side. And there's my wrong side.

You can see little pearl bumps down there. So you've noticed that the side that was facing me when I made the I-cord cast on, that's the wrong side. So I'm going to start with a right side row. So I hope you had fun learning the I-cord cast on here on The Knitting Circle. I'm Mary Beth Temple.

I look forward to seeing you again here real soon. Bye-bye.