Need to provisionally cast on a LOT of stitches? Here's a good trick to keep your count (and sanity). That's 260 stitches on a needle, in batches of 20. With this variant of the COWYAK waste yarn method, it's easy to work, and easy to count.
Step by step: As with all provisional casting on, use yarn the same weight the same as that you'll be knitting with. When you remove the provisional cast on, the loops will be just right: neither too small (used overly thin provisional yarn) nor too big (used overly thick provisional yarn).
Start by knotting together two different colors of the correct weight of yarn, let's say pink and light blue. Then, using long tail cast on, work the provisional cast on. Start with pink on thumb and light blue on forefinger. The thumb yarn makes the bottom loops, while the forefinger yarn makes the loops over the needle: pink base loops with light blue needle loops.
After casting on twenty stitches, re-arrange the yarn on your hands to the opposite: light blue on thumb and pink over forefinger. The loops over the needle and the base loops switch colors. Obviously, you can switch after 10, or 30 or any number, but choose a low-ish number to avoid going astray.
Closer view of how the yarn travels. The leftmost with pink loop over the needle is the first stitch cast on past the color-switch.
Closer view in real life, groups of 20 on needle.
- 1) Avoid twist in circular knitting: Cast on provisionally in waste yarn, then work back and forth in garter stitch for two to three rows, then join into a circle with the waste yarn for another round or two and THEN start in with the main yarn. This wide short tab of garter stitch is a cheap insurance policy against twisting--which happens more often than you'd think. And if you screw it up anyway, you have a round or two of waste yarn still to knit over the tab. Those rounds are there so you can still save your bacon by simply untwisting the waste yarn, then knitting right over where you untwisted. Yes, a tab + two rounds of waste yarn is a bit more work, but worth it to avoid the heartbreak of taking out a twisted cast on over hundreds of stitches or dozens of rows.
- 2) Match bind off to cast on. Whatever method you use to bind off at the end of your project, you'd then use that same method at the beginning edge. In other words, after removing the provisional cast on at the beginning of the project, the resulting live stitches are cast off to match the bind-off at project end.
- 3) Adjust length: Unless you happen to be knitting a pattern where the ribbing segues into cables*, a provisional cast on leading into the main body stitches lets you add the band afterwards, fine tuning the garment once it's mostly knit and can be tried on.
- --For bottom-up, body or sleeve, provisional cast on lets try on the garment and add a bottom band or cuff just exactly as long as you want it to be, after the main knitting is finished.
- --NOTE: For both bottom-up and top-down, you might like to consider working one or two rounds or rows in the main yarn above the waste yarn, before starting in on any texture or color patterns. In the Shetland sweater pictured above, there were two rounds of plain knitting before the color work started. This round or two of plain knitting acts as a buffer against the very odd way that purl stitches or color-knitting stitches present when you are trying to pick up their tails from a provisional cast on. It CAN be done, but it's less heart-stopping if there's a round two of stockinette stitches as a buffer.
- --For a plain stockinette garment, you can start in the middle of the sweater somewhere with your provisional cast on, and then adjust length at the bottom band AND neck band. (I say "stockinette sweater" for this trick because, for color-knit sweaters, this two-direction knitting results in the V's of the stitches pointing in opposite directions, and for texture patterns, many do look different when worked upside-down or right-side-up.)
- --In the common situation of ribbing bands and a stockinette body or sleeves, if you find you knit the sleeves or body too long, it's easy to pull out the stockinette sleeve/body stitches knit from the provisional cast on, but not so easy if you started with a ribbing which you have to pull out before you can adjust the length. This is because ribbing can't easily be undone in the opposite direction in which it was knit.
- 4) Keeping track: Especially if you have a LOT of stitches to keep track of, the two-color trick in this post lets the provisional cast-on do the work.
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