Nadina’s Free online knitting patterns

There is nothing wrong with knit casting onto the needles. It is the way I have cast on for many years. When you do, try this, it makes for a neater cast. Put the loop on your left needle, start by knitting into that loop and pull yarn through, then up over left needle (2 loops on left needle). From that point on, instead of going directly to the loop (as you would when knitting), place right needle BETWEEN loops on left needle, yarn over, draw through, and place loop over left needle. Going between the loops on the hook makes the edge much neater.

Pulling a loop THROUGH the stitch to cast-on a stitch is called the Knitted Cast-On and pulling a loop BETWEEN two stitches to
cast-on a stitch is called the Cable Cast-On. You can read about A LOT of ways of knitting in Montse Stanley’s Knitter’s Handbook

So here’s my $.02 on the idiot’s guide…

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Knitting & Crocheting, by Gail Diven & Cindy
Kitchel

Very good instructions & pictures of how to do cast on, knit, purl, increase, decrease, bind off. It also goes into knitting in the
round, fair isle, intarsia. Other sections on how to fix boo-boos such as dropped or twisted stitches, guage, and a discussion of different yarns & needles. 3 projects are included to use the skills as you learn them: a knitted dishcloth (increase/decrease), a scarf (knit/purl/counting stitches), and a hat (knitting in the round).

I would recommend this book to someone just learning how to knit—in fact I just used it to learn how to crochet, and it was clear & entertaining. I lent it to another woman who wanted to learn how to crochet, and she’s doing very well with it, too. But using it as a reference for either knit or crochet? I honestly cannot see myself ever opening it again, now that the
basics have been learned. A wonderful book to get someone started, but it’s a book that could be outgrown rather quickly.

I can tell you it’s not so easy to sew on buttons, especially with some of the interesting buttons you can get today!
You dont want the buttons you sew on a cardigan to look loose and dangly…Sometimes the chosen buttons can be too heavy for the knitted fabric. (This is fairly common with heavy pewter or other relatively heavy metal buttons.) The easiest way I’ve found around it is to sew on a smaller “backing button” along with the main button, but on the back of the buttonband. This goes a long way to stabilize the flopping button, and also keeps the knitted fabric more stable. The backing button can be an inexpensive plastic button that matches the buttonband color as closely as possible.

SO: Reinforcing with a clear plastic button (on the buttonband’s wrong side) will help prevent your knitting from stretching out when you wear your sweater buttoned.

This is especially helpful with soft, less stretchy yarns like cashmere and alpaca.

If you’ve raised livestock for very long you learn that most animals who are not healthy, die and the issue stops there. The old farmers never ate sick animals, those got hauled away/burned/buried. An injured animal that wasn’t drugged is safe to be butchered, but the degree of injury would affect adrenaline and likelihood of toughness, thus the decision would have to be made carefully and that animal might be best as dog food.

You also learn that healthy animals are grown on healthy land where they are rotated regularly to clean pastures. The individual farmer/rancher can’t afford to keep sick animals around and knows how and when to properly dispose of them.

Now the stark contrast here is the feedlot situation or chicken house situation where factory models are applied to livestock. Those are where you have diseased animals put into the food chain, not the private owners, it’s the corporate owners who aren’t actually onsite lovingly caring for all those unhealthily forcefed and drugged animals. Plenty of anonymous workers have reported illegal drug use in those animals, tipping off of when inspectors would be there, etc… The chicken house cleaning causes disabilities among the workers due to the chemicals used, fecal contamination abounds from mechanical evisceration.

You make your choice of which model to support every time you eat and I’m not advocating vegetarianism at all here. I’m advocating supporting local fibers, local foods, and building relationships with your neighbors that create trust and concern for wellbeing for everyone.

Trying to control everyone when the offenders are the corporate factory farms is just shear stupidity, because we all lose when the price of meat is too high for people to be well nourished and the cost of natural fibers goes up because the small guy who does the best job at raising good fleece and healthy animals can’t afford to keep up with govt. red tape.

Disease fear mongering is also part of the media/mind control and pharmaceutical marketing campains. Choose healthy foods and turn off that steady barage of commercials that tell you there’s a pill for everything, and this is less of an issue.

We don’t need to spend more taxpayer money just to lose more rights to LIFE and animal ownership!