Saturday, February 04, 2006

Explorations with i-cord for Mermaid

After all the discussions about the i-cord, I decided to give the different options a try and see what I liked best. In my book, Holly's suggestion of provisional cast-on followed by i-cord bind-off (especially when started at the collar and worked toward the hem) was the clear winner.

I also did a little practice swatch of the collar and hem edge techniques to understand what is going on.

There are photos of all of it and more commentary on my blog. click here.

2 comments:

amy! said...

Billie -- that's correct.

With a provisional cast-on, you should do it in a contrasting color (I'm using color C). Then you join A and work with it. And you should join A at the collar and work down to the hem and then start the pattern.

Then, when you're ready to do the bind-off, you carefully remove the cast-on (there's a way to do it with crochet that makes this easy, google it) and transfer all the loops of A to your needle. Then you start the i-cord and work the bind-off.

Doing a little more thinking about mine, I think I'm saving the bind-off of the cast-on for the very last thing. If you hem the collar, you should be able to work one big long continuous i-cord bind-off around it.

lv2knit said...

I used a provisional cast on, but did not do the i-cord edge until I was totally done with the jacket. I knitted up the right side of the front, picked up sts across the back neck edge, and then knitted down the left front (my original provisional cast on edge). I knitted the front collar in one piece and then did an i-cord bind off across all the sts. I did not have a seam along the back neck edge.