Determining Yarn Weights | LIVE Tutorial with Jen Lucas

Hello everybody and welcome to The Knitting Circle live question and answer. If you are new to the brand, The Knitting Circle is your online resource for all things knitting, and it's a place where you can find everything that you need from basic instruction to advanced techniques. Now, we are a community of enthusiastic knitters and we wanna create beautiful projects with sticks and string. My name is Leah and I'm your moderator. If you're viewing this event on our website, make sure to submit your questions and comments into the chat box below your video player.

And you can also participate by submitting your questions into the chat on Facebook or YouTube. Now, today we have with us the Managing Editor of The Knitting Circle, Jen Lucas. She's joining us today to answer all of your questions live during this Q&A session. And we have to say welcome to Jen. Thank you so much for joining us.

We're really excited to have you. And I'd love you to start out by telling us just a little bit about yourself and then also what you'll be talking about today. I know we've got a specific topic that we're going to focus in on. So I'm gonna give you the floor now. All right, thanks, Leah.

It's so good to see you and so great to be here. So like Leah said, my name's Jen Lucas, I'm the Managing Editor of The Knitting Circle and I've been knitting since about 2004, 2003, 2004, something like that. And about 2009, I took my just hobby and started turning it into a business, and so the last eight years I've been working full-time as a knit and crochet designer, and I'm so excited to be a part of The Knitting Circle and talk to you about all sorts of great techniques. So today what I wanted to demonstrate is how to determine the weight of a yarn when you don't know what the yarn is. So you've lost the label, or maybe you went to like a thrift store, an estate sale, and picked up some yarn and you're like, "I don't know what it is." I'm gonna show you just how easy it is to determine the yarn weight.

All right, and I do wanna draw your attention to that chat box as well here. There is a link that you can find here on how to determine yarn weights here at The Knitting Circle. You can always come back to this link and watch it later. Aisha was just talking about this with some of the ladies in her knitting circle. So this is going to be a popular topic I think, Jen.

Very excited to get into it. And of course, I'm gonna be popping in with some other little fun details, some downloads for you, and some community projects that we wanna share with you as well. But first, I'm gonna send it over to Jen, if you wanna get started on the topic, I'll let you know when any questions start to come in. Okay, great. So as Leah said, you can download the PDF and that will give you all the information for everything that we're gonna be doing here.

So what we're gonna be determining is the wraps per inch of the yarn. And so this is something that sometimes can confuse people because we're going to be just using a random knitting needle to determine this. But you can actually use just about anything. I have a crochet hook here, a pen, because we're gonna be measuring it along the length of the needle. So let me go ahead and show you exactly what I mean.

So here I have some yarn and of course, I happen to know what yarn this is, but let's say I just had this scrap of yarn and I'm like, "Oh, I wanted it with it, but I'm not sure. Is it bulky, DK, worsted, what's the deal?" So I'm just gonna grab a needle, it doesn't matter which one. We'll see what size this one is here, I think it's a 10. Nope, it's a 10 and a half. So this particular knitting needle is a US size 10 and a half, six and a half millimeter.

But again, it doesn't really matter and I'll show you that in a minute. So to start, I'm just gonna take a length of yarn and the knitting needle and just wrap the yarn around. And as you're doing this, you want the yarn to come together and each wrap to be touching the next wrap. But you don't want it too tight, you don't want it just loose, you just want them just perfectly touching. And if you're in a situation where you really are trying to figure out the weight of a yarn, you might try this a couple different times.

Before knitting was my job, I worked in a lab. So, you know, I would suggest doing a few trials, maybe try three or four times, and sort of make sure you're getting a similar number every time. So I'm just gonna wrap it around till I have something that looks like it's more than an inch. And then I'm just gonna use this needle gauge 'cause it has a ruler on it. And I try not to use the first couple wraps or the last couple wraps 'cause you can see here, this is getting kind of loose over here.

So I kind of, that's why I wrap more than an inch so I can take a measurement from the middle. And then I like to use another knitting needle and we're literally just gonna count the wraps around the needle. So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. So like this is 10, so the 10th is really right on that one inch mark. So now, if we come to our cheat sheet, which you have to download for yourself, you can see we are getting like nine and a half to 10 wraps.

So the wraps per inch are here, that falls into this category. So we know that this is a worsted weight yarn, which I do know that this is a worsted weight yarn. But this is a very easy way without like knitting a swatch or anything that you can determine the weight of your yarn. And this is something if you spin your own yarn, you're probably already very familiar with. But before we move on, I do want to show you that it really doesn't matter the size of the needle or whatever you're wrapping in the yarn around.

So here I have a crochet hook. And this one says it's a size P crochet hook, so 11.5 millimeter. And you can see here that it's much thicker than the knitting needle I used initially. So let's wrap around this one and see if we, you know, get the same number. So, again, and with this crochet hook, it kind of has this thumb grip here, so I'm gonna wrap around on the part that's all the same size.

So again, we're just gonna wrap it around and then just gently push them together until we have what looks like more than an inch. And I do like to set it down on a table. I think that makes it a little easier to read. I'm just gonna do a couple more on this side. There we go.

Okay. So now, holding this down, I'm going to measure again one, two... Let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. Okay, so this time we're getting 11 and you can see that still falls into that worsted weight, 9 to 11. So at this point if I was like, okay, if I had an entire ball of this, and especially if you have like a sweater quantity of yarn and you're gonna knit a sweater out of it, at this point you're like, "Okay, this is about a worsted weight." And then you can make some choices about what needle size you're gonna use.

And then, you know, depending on the project- Well, you should always be knitting a gauge swatch, but depending on your project before you would would start, I would recommend then knitting a few swatches in a few different needle sizes just to confirm that you're getting the fabric you want and it's working with the pattern you picked out. But this is a really easy way. I like to use this especially 'cause I save all my little scraps of yarn because, you know, I have dreams of making all these scrappy projects, so this is a great way, if you save all your scraps, you don't necessarily have to worry about having that label. You can just use this to sort of get you in the ballpark of what your yarn is. And one question that we have gotten a lot at The Knitting Circle is about does the size of the needle or crochet hook or pen or whatever matter?

And as you can see, it really doesn't. Because we're measuring along the length of it, so it doesn't matter how much yarn it takes to go around whatever you're wrapping it with, it's how much yarn is going this way. So that's why the size of the needle doesn't actually matter with this. And again, I just used this knitting needle gauge ruler 'cause that's what I have. But you could definitely do this with a tape measure, although, you know, this is flexible so you're gonna wanna just be careful.

And they also actually make little tools. You'll see them called a WPI ruler for wraps per inch and you can use one of those too. And actually in the free video that we have on The Knitting Circle website that shows you how to do this, that designer Karina Ferguson, she actually has one of those cute little wrap per inch rulers that's made specifically to do this. But if you're not a spinner and you don't have a lot of those tools, that's okay. You could do this with a regular ruler or a tape measure, flexible tape measure, whatever.

So that's what I wanted to show you, you know, today so that you can go ahead and save all those scraps or go looking for yarn at thrift stores and estate sales and not have to worry about, "Oh, no I don't have the label, what is it?" All right, that's fantastic to start us off. Now, I do wanna open this up to questions for our viewers and I want to assure you that you do not only have to ask questions about this technique. Anything that you've got knitting-wise that you have a question on, Jen is here to answer your questions. as well as as promised, we're gonna share some community projects a little bit later and I know Jen has some other upcoming projects from later today that I know she wants to talk about. But first, we're gonna get to our first question question.

and it comes in from Sherry. Jen, Sherry is a new knitter and seems to be struggling with holes in her knitting. So Sherry wants to know how would you suggest she go about fixing those holes when she encounters that problem? Okay, and this is something that I encountered too when I was a new knitter, the holes in the knitting. So most of the time, not always, but most of the time, if you're getting holes, you're either accidentally creating a yarn over, as in you're bringing the yarn over the needle and actually creating an extra stitch or you've started knitting a stitch and you haven't brought the needle all the way through so you almost sort of have the old stitch and the new stitch together on the needle and that can create a hole.

So we actually do have a couple of free videos on The Knitting Circle website that will cover these exact mistakes and you can see someone knitting through these mistakes and fixing them. But just as you're coming back on that wrong side row, if it looks like it's a yarn over, as in you've completed a stitch and the yarn's just coming completely over the needle, it's not attached to another stitch, you can actually just drop that yarn over off the needle. I know what I'm saying is scary 'cause I'm telling you to drop a stitch. But if you're sure it's just you brought the yarn over the needle, it's not attached to anything, you can just on the wrong side row, drop it, and keep on working and your stitch count will be the same. Now, if it's something where you didn't bring the needle all the way through and you kind of have this weird little stitch, then you can fix it on the wrong side row.

And I don't have anything knit here with me, but if you go check out that free video on The Knitting Circle website, we have a whole section on fixing mistakes and just different things to look out for when you're a beginner knitter so I would definitely go take a look at those. Those are actually linked, our entire free video library for The Knitting Circle is linked in the chat box as well. So any of the videos that Jen just mentioned, but also if you're just looking for some free videos that you wanna browse through and see what might help you with your knitting, that link is there for you in the chat box. I'm gonna bring us back to our topic we started with with the next question and comment here, Jen. This is from Aisha.

And Aisha's mentioning that how tightly you wrap the yarn around your object and how tightly you squish them together will definitely affect your results. I know you briefly touched on this when you were talking about wrapping, you wanna go back to that be a little more specific? I'm sure, especially being new to this, people might tie it really tightly, wrap it really tightly. How would you suggest kind of managing for that? Yes, and here, I've brought- Now I have a totally different size needle so let's try this one.

Let's see, this one's an eight. So we're going to just wrap the yarn around and I start by just, you can see keeping it kind of loose and then I just bring it together and this is kind of like Goldilocks, it's like finding that spot that's just right. So let me wrap and then I'll set it down and we can talk about it. Okay. So you don't want it too loose to where you're seeing spaces in between your wraps 'cause that's gonna obviously be too loose and you don't want it so tight where things are either starting to wrap on top of each other or they're really squished down.

You just want something where they're just sort of lightly touching each other. And this is something that definitely took me a little bit of practice to find sort of the right hand, I guess, to figure out how tight this should be. And that's part of the reason why I suggest, you know, doing trials and maybe take three or four measurements in order to make sure that you're getting the same or similar number every time. So let's do this one and count it. So again, and I try to avoid in that one inch area having, 'cause it is gonna start loosening up on the ends.

So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So on this one, again, I'm getting 10 so I'm right in that range. And you will find like you could measure on the same needle five times and not necessarily get the same number five times. And that's really part of also the reason that there's a range for a few different reasons because actually all the weights of yarn, even though you think like, okay, worsted weight is worsted weight, there's actually different thicknesses of worsted weight, which almost seems hard to believe. That was kind of hard for me to wrap my mind around at first.

Like for example, when I wrote my first knitting book, it was entirely shawls made out of sock yarn and so I was only ordering fingering weight yarn for my book projects and I couldn't believe when all that yarn was together. You're thinking, "Oh, it's all sock yarn." But the thicknesses of those yarns were all a little bit different. So that's one reason that you have the range. And then the other reason is that it is gonna depend on sorta how tight or loose you have those stitches. So the biggest thing is just make sure there's no space in between your wraps and don't sorta squeeze it so tight, 'cause if I have it squeezed together like this, now I'm getting probably 14, 15 wraps per inch and then now I think I have a totally different gauge of yarn.

So you just wanna keep it sorta loose, but where they're lightly touching. Now, Jen, what do you think about kind of working backwards a bit for practice? So say you have what you know is labeled a worsted weight yarn, could you then just practice creating that wrap, measuring it, making sure it falls into that range that you have on the PDF so that you get more comfortable with how that feels as you wrap it? Yes, and that's a great idea, Leah. And actually, when I was preparing to come here and do this demo, I mean I picked something that I already knew that this was a worsted weight and at home I practice that, okay, I'm wrapping the yarn around, I'm measuring, I am getting what our download says.

So yeah, that's a great tip, because especially when you get into those finer yarns, when you start getting into those fingering weight, sport weight, you know, that number, like what am I trying to say here? Like you can very easily get a different number and think you have a different weight of yarn because you have to wrap it around so many times for those thinner yarns to get an inch. So that's a great tip. Practice with yarn you already know that you have the label and that will give you great practice, so then when you do have something that you don't know, you have the skills to figure it out. All right, I think this is a great time to pause the questions for a moment.

Anybody that's watching, especially if you didn't join us at the top of the hour, we have Jen with us to answer your questions. So that's what the chat box is for. Please drop a question in for Jen and she'll answer as we have time. But, and a little pause here before we get to our next question, I wanna tell you about our community project gallery. So The Knitting Circle has one and we would love for you to show off your knitting project and be featured.

So we have four project submissions that we want to share in today's Q&A. And we're gonna start with the first one here. I'm gonna have Jen talk a little bit about it as well. This is a safe at-home blanket and this was submitted by one of our community members named Rhonda C. So take a look at it on the screen and then I would love for Jen, what are your thoughts?

What do you notice when you see this project? I mean, that is just one of the most beautiful blankets I've ever seen and Rhonda definitely put a lot of work into that. Without looking at the back, it's hard to say exactly what technique was used, but my guess is she did have to maybe use some intarsia, maybe she could have done some kind of like modular thing for the like rooftops or something. But that's a project that would be really great for your yarn scraps. And I'm sure, I think we looked at this one maybe a few months ago, so I think if you go and Google safe at-home blanket, you will find the pattern.

It's not a pattern that we have on our website, but I was able to find it online. But yeah, that is quite the blanket and it's absolutely beautiful. Okay, let's move to our second of four before we go back to some questions. This is submitted by Analisa, wanted to share her new sweater. And I really like the name of the pattern.

Instead of no problemo, it's no prob-llama. So got some llamas there and that's the name of her pattern. What do you see here? This is fantastic. Yeah, that is such a beautiful sweater.

I wanna knit one. So my guess is that this was worked from the top down and the yolk or the top of the sweater was used doing fair aisle or, you know, two-color color work. So I'm sure if you turned her sweater inside out, she would have the floats or strands from carrying the two yarns around. But what I love is that she did the work at the top and then most of the body and the sleeves are totally plain so you sort of get a break from like having to think about following a chart, carrying two yarns, and then you just have that detail along the bottom that looks like a mosaic pattern to me. So my guess is even though it looks like a mosaic pattern, it's still done using like stranded color work opposed to like a slip stitch mosaic-type technique.

But that's an absolutely stunning sweater. I love it too. Before we get to our next few submissions, it's time to go back to some questions, but we do have some more to share with you so stick around for sure. We're gonna get to a more general question though next, and this comes from Lisa. Lisa says, "Hi, Jen, what are some of your favorite knitting tools and what was one of your best investments that you made in your knitting?

Okay, ooh, knitting tools. You know, I am, this is like such a tiny little notion that like you don't even really think about, but I love a nice metal bent tip tapestry needle. They're my favorite for when I'm weaving in ends, doing the kitchener stitch on the toe of a sock, so that's like an inexpensive tool that like you need to finish your knitting, but you don't really think about that much. Like what kind of yarn or tapestry needle do you want? But if you haven't ever tried the bent tip ones, I highly recommend it.

I just find it's easier to work in your ends or do kitchener stitch. As for something that I've made an investment in, for me, this is hands down my yarn swift. So if you don't know, a yarn swift is something you use if your yarn comes in a hank, so it comes in like a big loop and then you wanna wind it into a ball, you can do that by hand, you can take that giant loop or hank of yarn and put it on the back of a chair or get your partner to hold it for you like this while you wind the ball. But a yarn swift, it's much easier and you can do it all yourself. So I had gone through a bunch of very inexpensive umbrella yarn swifts.

So an umbrella yarn swift typically clamps to your table and then it's got a pole and it opens, kind of like an umbrella and you can adjust it so it's the right circumference for that big loop or hank of yarn and then you can wind it. I just bought really cheap ones. They would last six, eight months start breaking, I'd be winding yarn and like the whole umbrella part would just like fall down and like yarn tangles would be everywhere. So about 10 years ago, I purchased a tabletop swift off of a maker on Etsy. It's made of wood, it's beautifully made, and it was expensive.

I think I spent about $150 on it, which is, to me, a lot for something like that. But it has held up perfectly, it works as good today as the day that I bought it. And so for me, that was something that was important for me to invest in, because even before knitting was my job, I knit a lot, I knit a lot with hand-dyed yarns and the hand-dyed yarns especially do typically come in that hank and need to be wounded to a ball before you start knitting with it. And because I do design and knit so many shawls and most of them are with hand-dyed yarn, buying that tabletop swift was a good investment because rather than spending, I don't know, 40 or 50 bucks every eight months on a swift that's gonna break, you know, I spent $150 or whatever 10 years ago and I'm still using the same swift. I've had to do nothing to fix it.

I mean, it's really held up well. So that's something if, you know, somebody's asking you for like really nice gift ideas, you can find tons of different ones on Etsy or, you know, if you know a woodworker who can make one, that's one of the best things I ever bought for my knitting. That really sounds like a great investment. 10 years, that's an amazing amount of time. Right?

All right, let's jump back into our official topic of the day before we go back to our community gallery. So Aisha did drop in one more comment about that wrapping, wraps per inch, which by the way, if you're just joining us, you can reference that PDF that Jen has pointed out before. There's a download link in the description of the video or in the chat box so you can go ahead and grab that if you haven't already. But when we're wrapping it, we've talked about kind of letting those wraps spread out too much or get squished too much. Aisha wants to know if you'll demonstrate what it looks like when you tug that yarn too tightly as you're wrapping so we can see what that looks like when you're pulling too much.

All right, yeah, let's do it. Okay, so I have again, random needle, I have a bunch of different sizes. I think this might be the 10 and a half again. So as we're wrapping, normally I'm just keeping it loose, I'm not really putting a lot of like extra tension on the yarn and so you've seen me do that a few times now. So let's try it.

Let's try to really tug on that yarn and see if that changes the number. My guess is it will because you're sort of taking the loft a little bit out of that yarn. So... Let's keep wrapping. So I'm really sorta giving it a tug here as I'm wrapping it around.

And I should say, this yarn that I'm using here is a hundred percent acrylic. So, you know, depending on the yarn, I mean, if you have a yarn that has elastic in it, you're really gonna have, I would imagine a much different number. Okay, so the first thing I'm noticing is by tugging tighter, these stitches, like they're all touching, but because I pulled on the yarn so tight, it's almost a little bit hard to tell which stitch is which, but we're gonna power through here. Okay. So we've got one, two, three, wait- One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

And then, yeah, we're almost getting 11 there. So you can see that we are getting more. I think, let's double check our sheet here. 11 is still in the range of worsted weight. It's right on the edge there, but you can see like eleven's the limit and then 12 is considered DK.

So we were getting a little bit of a higher number by really tugging on that yarn. And overall, I found with this particular yarn, it was much harder to tell like which stitch was or wrap, I keep saying stitches, but which wrap was which. So yeah, I just wouldn't like tug too tight on it. Again, it's gonna depend on the yarn content as well. This is a hundred percent acrylic, like I said, if you're using elastic, I've only really knit one pair of socks with yarn that had elastic in it and I didn't like it.

But you can really change like how thick the yarn is by your tension with that elastic yarn. So that's just something to keep in mind if you're, you know, using acrylic versus elastic versus something like bamboo or silk, it doesn't have a lot of, you know, there's not a lot of give to it where like you could tug on it, but if you're using something like alpaca, you know, you could also, you know, really tug on that too. So yeah, well, we just proved it. It does change the number a little bit, but depending on the content, it's gonna change it, I think more than others depending on what's in the yarn. That was a good question, I like that.

Yes, thank you for asking that. We are going to in a moment go back to our community sharing, our projects and have Jen take a look at a few more. But while we're doing that, I want to ask you, the viewer, for a little bit of input as well. So keep your questions coming for Jen, she'll continue to answer them. But also we want these lives to be as as useful for you and as fun for the community as possible, but that means that we're giving you what you're looking for and what you would need.

So while you're looking at these projects coming through or just thinking on your own, we wanna know what kind of patterns you would like to see in a future live demonstration or what kind of specialty stitches you would like to see, kind of coached through so that you can get into them a little bit more. So if you have ideas for that, please drop those into the chat box as well. We can always crowdsource, we love to know what it is that you're looking for in future live demonstrations. So that's enough for me. We're gonna go into our third community submission here.

This is from our project gallery that we have and this is from our member Jackie K. This is the beginning of a brick stitch dish cloth so you can really see the stitches up close in this photo. So Jen, what do you notice when you look at this one? Yeah, this is beautiful. So it's pretty clear to me that what's happening is you have one pretty solid yarn in that cream color and then the bricks, that's like a variegated yarn, so that yarn has a bunch of different colors in it.

So really, it's just two yarns here that are being used. This pattern looks very similar and it might actually be this pattern, I'm not sure, there's a pattern called the ballband dishcloth. It's pretty old 'cause I knit it like way back when I first started knitting. But it's still out there. It is in a knitting book, but I believe there's also a version of it that's free online, so if you just go and google ballband dish cloth, you'll find it.

And yeah, that's just made with slip stitches. So she's- Well, if it is made with slip stitches, she's only using one yarn at a time. So where you see those long sort of elongated V's there, like on the sides of each brick, that's just where a stitch was slipped and then it slipped for a few rows to create that brick look. So that's a really great beginner stitch, if you're new to slip stitch knitting or you're just looking for like a fun dishcloth pattern to make. I've made a ton of those over the years.

I love that one. All right, we have one more project to share today. And if you want yours shared, go ahead and drop it into the gallery. This last project for today comes in from Karen Doering and this is snowflake sweater sets and baby workman's socks. So nice, lovely, cute project here.

Jen, what are your thoughts on this one? I mean, this is just so cute. Like most of my family and friends are done having babies, but now I almost hope somebody has one more so I can knit it. So I love the collar. It looks to me like the collar is maybe worked with a button band at the same time at the end.

I love the colors, I love that it looks kind of like a sock monkey. But again, I think we have, it looks like it probably is some stranded color work where you have the cream and the red. It could be intarsia where those larger snowflake motifs are, or I guess also duplicate stitch. But no matter what was done, it's absolutely stunning. And one thing I wanna say about the project gallery is I really encourage all of you to share your projects there.

For me, one thing I've really been missing in the last couple years is that I haven't really been going out and like teaching in like physical venues to knitters like I used to, you know, I used to go all over the place and teach knitting classes and my absolute favorite part of going to teach a knitting class in person was just seeing what everybody was working on. I was always writing down patterns that I wanted to check out, yarns I wanted to try. And like I said, that's been kind of missing for me the last couple years is I haven't been out, you know, doing in-person teaching. So I would love if you went onto our project gallery and shared your projects because even when we're not doing these lives, I'm still looking at it every week and I'm getting so inspired and I know that you sharing your photo there is gonna just inspire so many other people too. Absolutely, and it does not have to necessarily be a completed project either.

If you've got, you know, a couple steps done and you wanna share your progress, that can go in as well. So please share away all of your projects. Let us see what you're working on. We love that kind of community here. We've got a question coming in from Diana before we start to tease a little more about what you've got coming up today, Jen.

So Diana wants to know if there is a way to determine how many yards of yarn you have on a skein that does not have a label? What do you think about that? Oh, how many yards? Okay, so a lot of times, what I will do is weigh the yarn, and try to sort of figure it out that way. So if you weigh the yarn, you can sometimes figure it out.

But if you don't have the label, that does make it a little bit harder. So sometimes what I'll do if I, if you have a yarn swift, I will, and I was talking about my tabletop one before, and so my tabletop swift has measurements on it, so I know if I set the pegs in certain places, that the circumference is, you know, 36 inches around so that would be a yard. So you could take your yarn, wind it on the swift, count how many times you went around and if you had it set to that 36 inches, you know, each time around's a yard, you go around 200 times, that's 200 yards. Obviously you might be taking a ball of yarn and putting it into a hank, then you'd have to turn it back into a ball. But that's one sort of easy way that doesn't take like a lot of thinking or planning to determine how much yarn you have.

And I use that system all the time, especially with my yarn scraps. So that's what I would recommend doing. Well, thank you for those tips. That's really helpful. Speaking of tips, we are blessed to have Jen in the studio for pretty much the entire afternoon.

So here's the part where you get to talk about what's coming up this afternoon. So I'll give the brief intro and then, Jen, if you wanna give us any details, it'll be pretty fun for people to know what to look forward to. So first is for our Knitting Circle Gold Members, if you are a Gold Member, at 1:45 PM Central, so not too long after we wrap up here, Jen's going to be doing a live tutorial on fancy starts. So this is all about hundreds of ways to cast on your knitting project. Why not start with something a little bit fancy?

That's going to be the first one this afternoon. And then at 3:30 PM, there is a free live tutorial, that's for everybody out there, to teach you how to make the Celine cowlette. And you can download the free pattern right now. That link is going to be dropped into the chat box for you so that you can take a look at that before we would start. That's at 3:30 PM Central today.

So Jen, what do you have to add about either of those tutorials you've got coming up? Okay, yeah, so the fancy starts, I'm so excited about this because, yes, you can just cast on your knitting and start your project. But sometimes you do want something that adds a little extra detail, something, well, a little fancy. So I'm gonna show you three different fancy starts. One is picot edging that we're gonna do.

We're just gonna do a regular cast on, but then do a little bit of knitting to make that edge. The next one is a twisted stockinette stitch edge that I learned from one of our contributors here at The Knitting Circle, Michelle Lee Bernstein. It's really cute. And so we're gonna be twisting our stockinette stitch. And then the third one is a three-color long tail cast on that makes like a beautiful little braid at the bottom of your knitting.

So that one in particular, all you're doing is literally the cast on is fancy. The other two you just cast on using a regular cast on method and then do a little bit of knitting to sort of make that start. And all of them are super fun. Some of them I think are especially great for like baby items. So I'm really excited to show you all that one.

Again, if you're a TKC Gold Member. And then later in the afternoon, we're going to look at the Celine cowlette. And so a cowlette, if you don't know, it's typically where you take the start of a triangle shawl, so we are gonna work back and forth in rows and then we're gonna join it in the round. So I love this technique because sometimes if you have a pattern where it's a top-down triangle and it's a little bit small, our project today is in a worsted weight yard, but I think back to maybe about 10 years ago, when we were all knitting one-skein fingering weight triangle shawls, and they're pretty small. Like on someone like me, it's a little hard to wear a triangle shawl that size just for my body type.

But the cowlette is perfect because you're basically taking that triangle shawl and then turning it into a cowl so you don't have to worry about it falling off, how to style it. You just put it over your head like a regular cowl. And so I'm gonna show you all the steps you need to make that particular project. And what's great is you're getting the pattern for the Celine cowlette specifically, but once you watch that video and you see how it works, you can take that technique and take just about any top-down triangle shawl pattern and turn it into a cowl if you want. So I'm really excited about that one too.

All right, and like I said, that link is available in the chat box, so even if you can't join us live, you can always come back and watch that later. Go ahead and download the pattern so you have it and then you can come back and see the tips that Jen is able to share as she goes through that live for you. It is time for me, I just checked the clock. We're running close to the end of today's Q&A so if you are hanging onto any questions for Jen, this is your chance to drop them into the chat box before we hit the time to say goodbye. We do have a few more to get to here and we'll start with Em Lu Fan and she asked, "Do you have a class, Jen, for beginners to make socks?

And could you point us in that direction if so?" Oh, yes. Actually, I think the last time I was in the studio, I filmed a class for knitting top-down socks using the magic loop method. But if you know how to knit in the round, it will apply to anything. And so that class is now on our website. So if you just go to the class section of The Knitting Circle, you will see that sock class.

And I love to knit socks. And we do have some other sock classes on The Knitting Circle website too that are really great. But I did just recently film one, and if you are a total beginner and you really just need to need to know how to knit purl and knit in the round, but I'll show you everything you need to know to make your socks. All right, we do have a comment in here coming in from Monique and she says she would like to learn more about, I believe it is pronounced entrelac knitting in a future live event. What do you think about something like that, Jen?

Ooh, I think that would be really, really great. And yes, I love that you're dropping what you wanna see in the chat box because I do use those things when we're planning out not just live events, but future content that we wanna put on the site. So if you wanna learn about entrelac, I'm gonna definitely add that to my list of things to do in a live, but also that's something that maybe we'll add in the future as far as, you know, standalone videos go on our website or classes on our website. I do know that on our sister site Craftsy, there is an entrelac class there taught by Gwen Bortner and I actually worked through that class before I ever worked with The Knitting Circle or with Craftsy, and it's a really great class. So in the meantime, if you wanna check that out, that's great.

But entrelac, it's a really cool technique and, yeah, I would love to show everyone about it in a future live for sure. Okay, I'm going to give our viewers just a last minute check in while I come in with a few reminders and let you have the floor for a couple of your own, Jen, for any last minute questions. Like Jen was saying, please continue to let us know what it is you would like to see coming up. Maybe let us know if you're a beginner, intermediate, advanced, how long you've been knitting. Also, if you think that that's something that would help tailor the content a little bit more.

We just wanna know where you're coming from and what you'd like to see. So you can drop those in with your last minute questions as well. A quick reminder, we just talked about what's coming up later on today. I'm gonna give you those times again. For our Knitting Circle Gold Members, that time is 1:45 PM Central, that's a live tutorial on fancy starts to cast on your knitting project.

And then at 3:30 PM, that's free for everybody, that's a tutorial on making the Celine cowlette, and the link for that pattern is in the chat box for you. You can check out all of the links that have been called out in today's Q&A in the chat box as well. And then, Jen, while we're looking for any last minute questions to come in, I also wanna give you the floor just to let us know where can we find you, what do you have coming up, anything exciting you wanna tell us about, and any final thoughts that you have about either today or anything knitting-wise that we haven't covered yet? Yeah, so if you are on social media, you can follow me @jenlucasdesigns on Instagram. That's really the only social media where I'm currently active as far as like my knitting and crochet go.

I am here in the studio for the next few days filming some new content and classes, so if you want sneak peeks on what's gonna be coming to the Knitting Circle, be sure to follow me over there. Again, it's @jenlucasdesigns, all one word. And yeah, I'm just really excited to bring all of you different content. And like we were saying, just let us know even when we get questions that come in on our videos or from the Ask an Expert on our website, those are all things I take into consideration when I'm thinking about what content we want in the future for these live demonstrations and the other videos and classes and stuff. So I just want you to know that we really do wanna listen to you and we want to give you what you want as far as knitting content goes.

So just always just let us know, watch these lives, drop it in the chat box and, you know, we love bringing you exactly the kind of knitting content you want. All right, well, Jen, as we speak, people are dropping in some other suggestions of things they want to see in the future, so we are excited to bring those to you. Keep those suggestions coming in. A couple reminders for me and then it is already time to say goodbye for today's Q&A , but we will have more, so definitely keep your eyes peeled for the next one. We can't wait until that time comes.

But in the meantime, go ahead and scroll through the chat box or just go back into the description of today's video. There is a link for the download for the free wraps per inch cheat sheet, that's that PDF that Jen had been referencing. You can find that link in those two places. Also, quite a few links in the chat box, and one of those is our community projects. So if you would like your project to be featured or you wanna share it with the community in general, you can find the link to that community project gallery as well.

And you can download the free Celine cowlette pattern for 3:30 PM, that live tutorial today, Central time in the chat box as well. So lots of links in there, lots of crowdsourcing in the chat box. And with that said, we have come to the end of our time, so I have to say thank you to Jen for all of her expertise. Thank you to all of you for joining us for your questions, your comments, and just enjoying a little bit of knitting community with us today. Until our next time, my name is Leah.

On behalf of our whole team, thank you for joining us. We will see you then. Happy knitting.