Hi to all you Knitty.com readers that have been hopping over here the last couple of days from the Magic Cast-On article. Please be sure to check out the knotless version, which also has one error in the article corrected (the wrong picture illustrating DPN step 10).

In your life, gentle reader, has there ever been a moment in time when you would give almost anything for a do-over? When you think to yourself, self, what were you thinking? You must have been having a really horrible hair day or something. Ever have that kind of day?

I would give a lot to be able to take back that little knot.

Actually, I offered my first born male child, but there were no takers.

(Just kidding, #1 Son!!! 😆 Really. 😉 You know I love you, sweety. Put on a sweater if you are cold.)

In my own knitting, I don’t like knots and never use them and eliminate them ruthlessly should I encounter them willy-nilly in a skein of yarn (which I loath. Don’t you think that for the price we pay for yarn, we could get a single strand of it?) But I honestly thought it would be easier for other knitters just starting with the Magic Cast-On to keep the first loop on the needle if it were a little slip-knot.

And thus was born a great deal of interweb discussion — to knot, or not to knot, that was the question.

So I will stand up, now: Hi, I’m Judy, and I’m a knotless knitter. I just twist the yarn around the needle to make the first loop, and hold it there with my right-hand index finger.

If you don’t like the knot, you can do that, too. If you don’t mind the knot and want to continue using it, that’s OK also. My motto is: whatever gets loops of string around your pointy sticks is a wonderful technique and you should keep doing it if it feels good. If it doesn’t feel good, then you should try a different technique until you find one that does feel good, and just keep making loops.

I love to sit with a group of knitters and watch the knitting techniques each uses. Everyone hold the yarn a little differently, makes stitches a little differently, knits fast, knits slow… but they are all knitting and producing beautiful fabric. How cool is that?