pepperknit

If magic loop looks like this (the piece wouldn’t sit still, so it looks a little weird):

Then lazy loop looks like this:

With this arrangement, you don’t risk getting a ladder in two spots and you can very easily shift the stitches around. It’s easy to scrunch all the stitches up to make the circle of knitting really small, providing plenty of empty cord to knit onto. I found that if I tried to shift the stitches while using “proper” magic loop, I was accidentally eliminating the second loop anyway.

This is also nice because it makes the beginning of the round immediately obvious. While I know that stitch markers are easy and cheap, sometimes my notions supply is not within reach. (Like, it’s on the floor next to the couch and I’m sitting on the couch. Obviously way too far away.)

As I said this morning, this simplified magic loop won’t work as well for a small piece, like a sock—you need the stitches to be numerous enough to create a continuous loop with one “needle” in the circle. Hope this helps you visualize it, and I hope it comes in handy (if you haven’t happened upon it yourself already).

Finally! 2 weeks and 1 day after the order was shipped, royal mail came through with a small package replete with 5 balls of Rowan Cotton Glace in “Bud.” It is such a supremely vegetative shade of green, and I’m thrilled. Not too “baby,” not too raucous.

Eager to get this on the needles–I’d toyed with the thought of joining the Knitting Olympics and making this my project, but let’s be serious: Wait to cast on? Call this a challenge? Neither was going to happen.

Funny enough though, the whole process of casting on was more onerous than I thought it would be. Probably exacerbated by the fact that we watched The Constant Gardener last night, which was so intense it at times demanded rapt attention and at others made me very happy to have something in my hands to focus on. (It was also way better than I’d thought it would be, despite positive reviews and such.) As a result, I cast on about 5 times. Finally got started.

I decided to knit it in the round, at least til the armholes, because if there’s anything that keeps me from finishing a sweater, it’s finishing the sweater. I realized only after I’d started knitting that the pattern calls for the piece to not be connected at the very bottom. So . . . do I take it out and cast on again, making two parts that I can then join in the round when appropriate? We’ll see how I’m feeling about it tonight.

Oh, and recently while doing some secret knitting, I discovered what I call the lazy knitter’s magic loop. That is, I don’t pull a loop out through the middle of the work. I just let all the loopage be at the start of a row. For me, this is far less unwieldy, and when you’ve got a lot of stitches on the needles, as I do, it’s a LOT easier. Is there any particular reason we all create two loops? I suppose for a small item, one in which the piece is as short as or shorter than the length of the solid part of needle, you’d have to have the two loop thing. But for sweaters on 40″ circs, this method is clean and easy.