Tubular Cast-On woes? We feel your pain!

Raise your hand if you’ve tried a tubular cast-on!

Raise your hand if you’ve watched 20 tutorials about the tubular cast-on and you still don’t get it! — Yep, we can relate.

Lately everywhere we look we’re seeing designers use the Tubular Cast-On — including many of our favorite European designers and Maine’s own Andrea Mowry. With almost 500K plays on Andrea Mowry’s video tutorial, obviously lots of folks are using it! (Or it could be the same person watching it over and over because they just can’t get it!)

We know it’s popular, we know it’s pretty, but the tubular cast-on is just so darn fiddly. Some of us have tried, failed, and then opted to ignore pattern directions that call for tubular cast-on and just use the long-tail cast-on instead. 

Until now!

Tubular Cast-On: What’s all the fuss about it?

This is a cast-on method that’s used to create a neat finished edge for ribbing. The tubular cast-on is nice and stretchy, with the knit and purl stitches appearing to continue smoothly from one side of the fabric to the other — with no interruption in the texture of the fabric from the cast-on like you’d get with long-tail.

It really is lovely to look at!

We found a tubular cast-on method that doesn’t break your brain!

…And we have a customer to thank for it! 

Our Local Goat Alice came in with a beautiful cardigan pattern by Carol Sunday of SundayKnits. It called for a tubular cast-on and we followed a link to Carol’s website for her tubular cast-on tutorial — and suddenly it all made sense!

Carol’s post gives really thorough written instructions for what to do, and there’s an accompanying illustration as well.

We also found this technique for the tubular cast-on in Cast On Bind Off: 54 Step-by-Step Methods by Leslie Ann Bestor.

Video Tutorial from The Goat

We decided to create a tutorial for this method of tubular cast-on because we hadn’t found it online anywhere. See what you think and let us know in the comments on the video!