Casting On with Two Needles Held Together

Hi everyone. I'm Jen Lucas, from the Knitting Circle in this lesson let's take a look at a loose way to cast on our stitches. We're going to be working the long tail cast on but with two needles held together. This creates a very loose cast on that is great if you're working brioche, or you're just finding that your cast on is a little bit too tight for your knitting project. So let's go ahead and take a look. Let's take a look at casting on with two needles held together. I'm going to demonstrate how to do this technique using the long tail cast on. That's most commonly where you're going to need to use this little trick. You can use it with some other cast ons but this is most commonly where you're going to use it. You might need to use this method of casting on with two needles held together if you have a project where it tells you to cast on very loosely for something like brioche or you might just be somebody that tends to cast on pretty tight, this could be a solution for you. There's also a lot of other cast ons you could try, but if long tail cast on is what you like the best or the pattern calls for a long tail cast on, then you're going to want to do this with the two needles held together. So to start, I just want to briefly talk about long tail cast on. So for a long tail you would have a long tail make your slip knot. And then with a single needle, you would cast on your stitches onto that single needle, just like that, and you would keep going. Instead of having that single needle, we're, of course, going to have two needles held together. So I just have my two needles here. I'm just using some double points, and I'm going to start by estimating how long my tail needs to be. So I'm going to hold my two needles together and I'm going to wrap this around 10 times. So that's 10. I'm going to pull it off. And now I've estimated this much tail for 10 stitches. So I'm just going to do 10 stitches here. But if you had a project where you needed more, then you could just fold the yarn over to estimate 20, fold it over again, 30, and so on. So I'm going to go ahead and make my slip not here where I'm pinching it with my right hand. So we're going to go ahead and make that slip knot. And we're going to insert both needles into that slip knot to get that slip knot on both needles, just like this. And we'll just pull it down a little bit. Don't want to crank too tight but just enough to hold it in place. So now just holding these two needles together I'm going to go ahead and do that long tail cast on. So I have the long tail going over my thumb and my working yarn, that's going to my ball of yarn over my pointer. And then I'm just going to work the long tail cast on in this way, just like you normally would. And we have a video on how to do the long tail cast on if you need a more in depth detail on how to do long tail cast on, we're just going under the loop on the thumb, under the index finger and through the loop here, and pulling it down. And so we're just working that long tail cast on but we're just working it over the two needles held together just like that. So I'm just going to go ahead and cast on just a few more. I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Let's get to that 10, eight, nine, and 10. So there we go. So now we have two needles held together but we're ready to start knitting. We're just going to take one of these needles and slide it out and you can see, we have this nice loose cast on, it's nice and stretchy, very loose, and we're ready to start our project. That's super easy, right? We're just holding two needles together instead of using a single needle to cast on. I hope that you enjoyed learning with me here at The Knitting Circle. And if you found this video helpful, be sure to check out all the other great knitting videos we have here on our website. There's so many techniques to learn.