Welcome to this Arnall-Culliford tutorial for Modern Daily Knitting
on joining to work in the round when using double pointed needles.
This tutorial is part of a series to accompany the Modern Daily Knitting Field Guide Number 18: Beginnings.
This little book includes a series of beautiful designs all by Karida Collins,
and the tutorial today relates specifically to the Debut Pullover, but it's also equally helpful
for any project where you need to use double pointed needles and join to work in the round.
So what does a pattern mean when it says join to work in the round, taking care not to twist?
It's a very common bit of wording to see in a pattern, and all it means is that when you join
to work in the round, you're looking to make a nice straightforward tube like this one.
So this could be the cuff of a sleeve, and it's a straight tube, no problem. But what can happen
is that you get a twist in your cast on edge, and when you join to work in the round, you then make
a tube which is also twisted. So it's nice and fine on that side, but if you look at the back here, this
bit's okay, but then here the cuff goes up and over the needles and round, and it's not possible
to remove that twist from the piece of knitting. So unless you wanted a twisted, twisted tube,
you're going to have to start again because with this much fabric it's not possible to untwist it.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to join to work in the round,
and how to check it isn't twisted. I'll also show you how to remove a twist at the end of the first
round of work just in case you didn't spot it before, and then I'm also going to show you an
extra method that just makes it extra easy to see whether or not it's twisted
where you work the first row flat before joining to work in the round. If you're watching on YouTube
and you hover over the time bar at the bottom of this video, you'll see the chapters marked out so
you can jump straight to the part of the video that you're interested in. The first task is to
cast all of your stitches onto one double pointed needle. So I've put them all on this one here. Don't
forget that we've got a video for circular needles as well, and you'll find that in the notes section.
Once you've cast on all of your stitches, just run your fingers along the bottom, bottom edge there,
and make sure that it's lying completely flat. Okay, that's how it should look, what you do not want is
anything like that where there's a twist, and it's going up over the needles. So if it's looking like
that, just take the time to twist everything back down, and get your cast on edge nice and straight.
Once you're satisfied that your cast on edge is straight,
you're going to divide all the stitches across all of the needles that you're going to be using,
and you do that by simply slipping them from that first needle onto the next one,
and you just want them roughly distributed it doesn't matter at all
at this point how many stitches you have on each needle. You just want them arranged so that they're
spread out across all of your needles. Okay, we're just slipping them from one to the other,
so here I've distributed my stitches across four needles,
and I literally just slip them from one to the next, and I'm just going to check on the
bottom here that my cast on edge is still running nice and straight. There's no twist
introduced to any of those points. And I now need to arrange myself so that I've got my yarn
on the right hand side, and the next needle to work onto with these stitches at the end
on the left hand side. All I'm going to do is I'm literally just going to swing these around
like so, and then I'm going to end up with my yarn on the right and the end
stitch on the left ready to knit onto. At this point you probably want to shuffle the
stitches at the back just into the middle of the double points so that they're not going anywhere.
And then the stitches on these two are going to come down to the tip,
and now we've picked our needles up we've got the yarn attached on the right,
the stitches where we're going to join the two ends on the left, we're going to place a marker
onto that right hand needle to mark the end of the round, and then we're literally just going to knit
into that stitch, and that's what joins us into the round.
Okay just have another look, you can see because I didn't
twist it from how it was lying flat, I should have my cast on edge there all nice and untwisted.
I'm now going to work around in three by two rib, and show you how if you do find you've got
a twist, you can untwist it at the end of that first round. Here we are at the end of our first
round, and you can see that we've got our first row of stitches there, and they go all the way around
the tail out of the way and you can see that they go all the way around quite happily and
at no point do they go up and over the needles which is the problem that we're looking out for.
If, however, when you get to the end of the first round, so we've reached the marker, you follow that
first row of stitches along and you discover that, oh, it's going up and over the needles and round,
you'll be very happy to know that you can sort it out at this point because actually,
where you've joined in the round at the moment, there's literally just one strand of yarn here.
And so what you can do is you can move that twist out along the needles, and move it into
that single strand of yarn where it will be completely invisible. And here's how you do that.
To untwist that edge, simply go along with your fingers and literally just move the edge back,
ticking the tip, tucking the tips back under and moving everything round, untwisting all the way.
And so you're essentially pushing the twist up into that strand of yarn at the join of the round,
and once you've done that, and you've checked that your edge
is now lying all flat, you can slip your marker and carry on working knowing that you've untwisted it.
If you're finding it tricky to check that cast on edge,
and particularly if you're using a finer yarn, then you may find the following tip helps.
Instead of casting on your stitches and joining to work in the round straight away, what you can do
instead is work your first row flat. So here we've cast on our stitches, and I'm now going to take the
working yarn, not the tail, and I'm going to work that first round in my rib pattern.
And i'm not going to work it in the round, I'm just knitting it flat, straight off the end.
I've worked in my rib pattern across that first row, just as if i were working in the round. so it's
knit three purl two. I've worked all the way along to the end of the row, and now I'm going to join in
the round. So what Ii need to do is distribute my stitches across my double pointed needles,
all of the ones that I'm wanting to use, and I'm then going to arrange these stitches at the end
of the row on my right needle, and these stitches from the beginning of the row on my left needle,
just as you did before. Slip the stitches roughly onto your,
that's the needles one.
So I've slipped my stitches roughly onto the four needles I want to be using, and now I need
to get this one around on the right, and I'm going to shuffle the stitches along so that they're now
near the tip ready to work. This one's the one that wants to be on the left, shuffle them along
and put them there, and now I'm just going to check that that edge isn't twisted, and it's easier now
that we've got a good bit of fabric, it's easier to see if it's got twisted at the joins, which
this one hasn't. Okay, it's straight there all the way around to there, and all I need to do now
is pick it up and work into the first stitch to join it, not forgetting to place
the marker. So I'm just bringing the yarn around to the back because i was purling,
and now I want to knit so I've brought the yarn to the back, and here we go, marker on the needle,
and I'm joining to work in the rounds by simply knitting that first stitch.
Okay, ,and I'm off. I can turn it over, just have another look. You don't need
to be paranoid about it, but if you ever have twisted your knitting when you've joined to
work in the round, you'll know that it is really irritating if you don't notice it soon enough.
So it is worth just a second or two to double check, especially if you're new, all the way around,
no twist in it, that's fine. It's not going up over the needles, and off we go. But of course with this,
you've got the extra, extra double check that even if you do get to the end of the next round
and you find you've got a twist, at that point you can push it out because you'll have that
single strand of yarn where you joined. So you really do have lots of double checks with this one.
If you do work one row flat before joining to work in the round, you'll discover that
you end up with a little bit of a gap here at the start of the round.
But that's ever so easy to fix, and it really just involves weaving in the tail from your cast on
edge, and just using that tail to join the edge of the fabric there to the bottom. And it's really not
a lot more bother than weaving the end in would be anyway, so I don't think that that's too much of a
price to pay for that extra security if you feel you need it. I do hope that our tutorial on joining
to work in the round, taking care not to twist, when using DPNs has given you heaps of confidence
to cast on for Karida Collin's fantastic Debut Pullover found in Field Guide No. 18: Beginnings.
If you've enjoyed this tutorial, then you may well be interested in the tutorials, hints and tips
that you'll find over on our website which you can reach by clicking the link up here,
so do go and explore. You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel so that you know when we release
our next video using the button on the bottom right here. Thanks ever so much for watching, bye.