This is my favourite technique for casting on the toe of a sock.

Check out knitty for a great written (by the inventor) description, but here’s a quick clip I found on youtube.

Once again, the calibre of videos on youtube are appalling, this is the shaky best that I could find.

I’m seriously considering breaking out the camera and recording a few of my own when I get back from my travels.

Alas, onward to the technique:

Five skeins out of five.

Kitchener is an invaluable technique in knitting, in my opinion it’s the only way to make a seemless join between two rows of live stitches.

It’s a fiddly technique to learn, but well worth the effort.

Truth told, the demonstrations on youtube are kind of mediocre, so here’s the best of a bad bunch, feel free to comment with links to better descriptions of the process.

Five skeins out of five.

This is my all-time favourite cast on.

It’s quick, easy to execute and remember and it’s stretchy. Once you have a feel for how much yarn your tail needs, you won’t know how you lived without it.

It’s the cast on I almost always use for my own designs, because I love that you’re creating the first row while you cast on, it’s economy of knitting and I’m nothing if not lazy.

This video, taken from youtube, was made by the very generous people behind Knitting Help, a wonderful knitting resource, and it’s the one I learned the technique from.

Five skeins out of five.

My favourite cast off for socks is the sewn cast off, popularised by Elizabeth Zimmerman.

It’s a little bit fiddly and I find it definitely works best with 1×1 ribbing, but it’s a good one to have in your repertoire.

The cast off is stretchy and almost invisible, which is a very good thing.

Four and a half skeins out of five

To be honest, I don’t find cabling with a needle too cumbersome, I tend to use a DPN or a circular needle tip (without the cord) instead of an actual cable needle, but I don’t really find that it slows me down.

That said, when I’m doing a lot of cables, such as recently while making my Mr Greenjeans, I’m glad to know this technique for when I’m on the road and don’t have access to a spare needle.

Don’t be alarmed, this video doesn’t have any sound, but it’s a good representation of how to work the technique.

Three skeins out of five (but only because it’s not really all that necessary).