#jmco

So I've never knit a shawl before because I don't wear shawls, but I wanted a bandana to wear at work in the winter, and I was way more attracted to the shawl patterns than the bandana patterns I found, so I figured it wouldn't be hard to just make a mini shawl and call it a bandana.

I knit a few swatches and figured out what adjustments I wanted for the bandana, but I just could not get the garter tab to look right. I tried the long tail cast on, the Turkish CO, Judy's Magic CO, all sorts of things. With a regular cast on, the picked up row would always be a mess, and with the provisional cast ons, there would always be a gap where there were two knit rows or two purl rows next to each other. I watched so many videos and read so many articles, and I couldn't figure out what I was missing. I began to suspect that it was not me who was missing something.

Stephen West, in his garter tab tutorial, says of picking up stitches from the CO: "There's no rules for this. Just get any three strands of yarn." And it occurred to me: Most shawls are quite large, knit with relatively fine yarn, and the garter tab is a tiny thing that gets lost behind your neck. Maybe people just don't care that much how it looks.

But I am knitting my bandana with DK, and the garter tab is going to be smack dab in the middle of my forehead. Any irregularities will be glaring.

Now, the yarn I'm working with is Bernat Softee Baby, which while it's very soft and pretty, is awful to work with: it splits like crazy, and is such a messy yarn that it can be hard to see what's happening. On top of that I'm knitting at a fairly tight gauge because I want a relatively stiff fabric. So when I looked at my many garter tab swatches, it was hard to see what was actually going on. So I decided to do a few experiments using a familiar aran yarn and much larger needles.

SWATCH #1: Long tail cast on

Immediately after doing my LTCO, I ran my Clover Circular Stitch Holder through the stitches so that I could be sure that I was picking up the right stitches. As you can see, this cast on creates a gap that has a couple random stitches in it.

SWATCH #2: Needle and hook crochet provisional CO

I followed instructions from Tin Can Knits, but even on my second attempt I had a really hard time picking up my provisional stitches. So I don't know if I did it right, but I ended up with what looks like a gap created by two knit rows next to each other, which is not what we want in garter stitch.

SWATCH #3: Judy's Magic Cast On (traditional)

Laura Nelkin has a great video on how to do this. But as is only logical, it results in two purl rows next to each other.

SWATCH #4: JMCO knit from the purl side

With JMCO, after you've cast on your stitches, you rotate your needles around soon that they're pointing to the right and start knitting. But what if you also flipped the whole thing over so that the purl stitches are facing you?

In the photo above, it looks like I have ended up with the same problem of two purl rows next to each other, but when I looked more carefully, I saw that there was a knit row between them, it was just tiny. I realized: Traditionally, when you start knitting into your JMCO, you're knitting into the stitch that was just cast on. But the way I was flipping things, that stitch was sitting on the needle cable, with nothing to keep it at the right size.

SWATCH #5: JMCO knit from the purl side more carefully

This time I carefully crossed my tail over the working yarn to hold the stitch at the right size before pulling my working needle out of the cast on stitches.

I found this much easier using a grippy needle and knitting Norwegian. I'm knitting the actual bandana on metal needles, but to get this cast on to work with the Softee Baby, I had to do the cast on with wooden needles.