Purple Prophecy

If you have too few stitches, make sure to check out Mistakes Part 1, since that’s the tutorial about disappearing stitches!

I have more stitches than when I started. What did I do?

There is a huge chance you figured out a way to do something wrong that was, up until now, undiscovered by humans. But if you didn’t, you probably made something knitters call a ‘yarn over’. If you did, you have also found the reason you have holes like this in your knitting:

Those holes we will have to fix at the end, but they can be fixed. So don’t worry about them for now. Let’s look at what you did to create them instead. A yarn over is what happens when you wrap the yarn around your needle between stitches, basically creating a new, ‘fake’, stitch. Sometimes patterns call for this, but a lot of times beginning knitters do this by accident.

Now, take a look at the stitches currently on your needle. See how every stitch seems to come from a line of little v’s? When you make a yarn over, the new ‘stitch’ doesn’t have anything like that. It’s just a fake ‘stitch’. Also, the stitch on your needle will look all wonky. 

Well, that’s nice and all, but how do I fix it?

In Mistakes Part 1 I explained that to fix a mistake, you have to deliberately make the other mistake. So if you accidentally increase, you have to decrease to fix it and vice versa. If you made stitches that shouldn’t be there, you’ll have to remove some stitches. You’ll do this by ‘knitting two together’. 

Knitting two together is something that’s often done on purpose to decrease the amount of stitches. In a pattern, it would look like ‘k2tog’. When reading a pattern, K always means ‘knit’ and P means ‘purl’ (look at the previous entries if you have forgotten what purling is). So ‘k2tog’ means knit two together, see? Patterns may look scary, but they really aren’t.

But how do you do it? Well, just like I said! Instead of sticking your right needle through just one loop, you stick it through two at the same time. If you knit very tight, this may be a bit difficult at first. Just make sure you stick the needle through the actual loop and not through your knitting.

Then you just pretend you only have one loop on your needle and knit just like you always do. And as you’ll see, where you had two loops on the left needle, you will end up with only one on the right. That’s all there is to it! Good job! Just count how many stitches you have too many and knit two together to decrease by one as many times as you have to. However: please note that two stitches knitted together doesn’t look as pretty as a ‘normal’ stitch. But if you think about how many stitches will be in your finished product, you understand you probably won’t ever notice it, don’t you?

If you need to make a lot of stitches disappear and want to make sure it won’t be as noticeable, make sure to space them nicely, maybe put about twenty ‘normal’ stitches between them and you won’t ever notice they’re there.

What you just did is called ‘decreasing’ and of course there are many more methods to do so. If you already know of a different method, feel free to use that! And if you stay with me after you finish your scarf, you’ll learn many more.

But how do I stop those ugly holes from showing up?

We’ll fix the ones you already made when your scarf is ready. However, if you paid attention to the pictures in this entry or to your own work, you’ve seen that a yarn over is a lot bigger/wider than a normal stitch. So when you get to one you made in the previous row, you’ll be able to see it’s different. To fix that, you simply knit in the back of the stitch! Just like I showed you in Mistakes Part 1. Instead of knitting normally and then again in the back of the stitch, only knit in the back of the stitch and your yarn over will not leave a hole.

But I’m very clever and noticed I made a mistake just a few stitches ago! Can’t I go back and fix that mistake instead of adjusting the amount of stitches later?

Of course you can! Just check out Mistakes Part 3: Tinking!

If there is a part of this you just don’t get, very soon there will be a video about all the ‘Mistake entries’. If you don’t want to wait, just send me an email (yola.purpleprophecy@gmail.com), let me know on twitter (@PurpleProphecy) or use the ‘ask’ funtion on this blog! 

Oh dear. You’ve run into one of the most common mistakes every knitter makes. When you started knitting, I told you to keep counting your stitches after every row. Then NaNoWriMo came along (if you don’t know what that is, go look at www.nanowrimo.org, see you there next year!) and nobody had time for knitting (or writing entries for a blog). But now it’s December and Christmas-y and it’s time to pick up your knitting again.

But now you pick it up after a bit of time and notice you don’t have the amount of stitches you started with. Let’s fix that. If you’ve got too many stitches, make sure to check out Mistakes Part 2, since that’s the tutorial about multiplying stitches.

I have fewer stitches than when I started. What did I do? 

I can’t tell you exactly what you did wrong, because new knitters will find spectacular ways to make mistakes no one has thought of before. However, I can tell you what the most common problems are.

What you did was probably:

a) drop a stitch, which will get a whole separate entry later. You can recognize this mistake because you now have a ‘ladder’ in your work, like in this picture:

b) knit two together. If you did this, you accidentally put your needle through two stitches at the same time instead of just one. When you do this, you only make one new loop out of two stitches, so you end up with one loop less than you started with.

Well, that’s nice and all, but how do I fix it? 

This is where I’m going to give you lots of good news. You fix each of these mistakes by on purpose making the other one. If you’ve got too few stitches, you have to create some and when you have too many, you have to lose a few. Increases and decreases can be made in a lot of ways however, so I’m going to show you the ones that are (in my opinion) easiest to learn.

You can’t create a stitch out of nothing. This is the fifth Principle Exception to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration. You can however create a stitch from another stitch, so that’s what we are going to do. The way you normally knit is called ‘knitting in the front of the stitch’. But to make another stitch, you will have to knit ‘in the back of the stitch’. Maybe this sounds confusing, but it really isn’t. It’s just how knitters call things.

First, you knit a stitch just like you normally would. But don’t let it slide off your left needle!

Instead, stick the right needle through it again. But this time, you won’t stick your needle through from left to right, like you normally do (‘in the front’), but from right to left (‘in the back’)!

Wrap the yarn around your working needle (that’s the right one) again, just like you always do. Now move your left needle to make the stitch go over the yarn and the point of the right needle. Again, this is exactly like you always do.

Now you can let the stitch slide of your left needle. You’ve made two stitches out of one! If you look closely at this picture, you can see what it looks like:

See how every stitch has a row of previous stitches (v’s) under it? And how that last stitch you made on your right needle doesn’t have one of those rows? That’s because you just made it. From now on there will be an extra row of v’s under this stitch, but only from the row where you created it. I’m pulling my work a bit apart on this picture, but if you look at your own work you’ll see it too. 

What you just did is called ‘increasing’ and of course there are many more methods to do so. If you already know of a different method, feel free to use that! And if you stay with me after you finished your scarf, you’ll learn many more.

But I’m very clever and noticed I made a mistake just a few stitches ago! Can’t I go back and fix that mistake instead of adjusting the amount of stitches later? 

Of course you can! Just check out Mistakes Part 3: Tinking!

If there is a part of this you just don’t get, very soon there will be a video about all the ‘Mistake entries’. If you don’t want to wait, just send me an email (yola.purpleprophecy@gmail.com), let me know on twitter (@PurpleProphecy) or use the ‘ask’ funtion on this blog!

Have you all been knitting this week? How are the scarves coming along? And if you still have to start, well, why haven’t you already? And why am I asking so many questions?

If you have started, you have made mistakes. If you haven’t, please tell me how you did it because that would be a miracle. Or there is magic involved, which I would consider cheating. Unless you’re Molly Weasley and you have to knit a thousand jumpers. I have no doubt you will all become amazing knitters, but right now you are beginners. And beginners make mistakes. If only because at first it seems nearly impossible to hold the needles in a way that leaves enough fingers free to actually knit. And you will probably be knitting too tight (it’s a beginners thing), so chances are you have seen a stitch slide from your needles before you were able to knit it. Or you ended up with way too many stitches without knowing how you made those. Or there are holes the size of a Norwegian Ridgeback in your work. Maybe –even though I warned you! – you tried to knit a Möbius band and accidentally ripped the fabric of reality apart and created a hole into the Dungeon Dimensions and now there are Things trying to get through to our side. In that case, thanks a lot.  

But if you only made mistakes that won’t lead to the end of the human race, the world and possibly the multiverse, don’t worry! The next entry will be coming soon (if no one else made a mistake as described above, that is) and it will save your life! Or at least your knitting. I’ll cover some often made mistakes, but I’d also like you to tell me about mistake you made, even if you’re not exactly sure what went wrong. That way I can help you fix it and tell others what not to do!

So let me know about your mistakes by using the ‘ask’ function here, or email them to me at yola.purpleprophecy@gmail.com or let me know on Twitter (@PurpleProphecy)!

Some of you have already started knitting and I’ve heard some of you even managed to knit 35 rows already! I also know some of you still have to get started and you guys can ignore this entry for now. Or read it already so you know what’s coming!

Anyway, when you reach row 36 it’s time to start the stripes. Whichever style (Original Design or Prisoner of Azkaban) you prefer, you have to change colours now and put your row counter to zero. Or get your trained animals to move back, if you chose that method of counting.

When you get to your marker (the bit of CC yarn I showed you in the previous tutorial), you slide it to the right needle and you stick the needle through the first stitch of the 36th row. Exactly like you have done all those rows before.

Also, you may want to change your marker into your MC, because you’re working with your CC now! If you don’t think you’ll get confused and mistake it for another stitch, just carry on. Now you drop the main colour (MC) yarn and just ignore it for a bit. Grab your contrast colour (CC) and wrap it around the right needle. Make sure the loose end is on the bottom of (under) the needle and the bit with the skein of yarn at the end on top, like you see here:

If you did everything right, which I’m sure you did, you now have three pieces of yarn, two CC ones and an MC one. Hold all of them in one hand.

Bring the left needle with the loop over the CC yarn on the right needle. If some of this seems familiar, well spotted! You’re just knitting like you did all this time, the only difference is that the new CC loop on the right needle isn’t attached to the rest of your work yet.

Congratulations! You have made a new stitch like you did a lot of times before, only this time it has a different colour. But as you may have noticed this new stitch is still very loose. Ignore that and knit one or two more stitches, taking care you don’t pull the first one loose. Also make sure you don’t accidentally grab the short bit of CC yarn! Use the long thread that ends in the skein.

Push the stitches on your needles a bit back so they won’t come off your needles. If you can’t do this, you are knitting too tight! Look at the back side (inside) of your work and notice there are two bits of yarn there now: the loose bit of CC and the MC that ends in the skein. Take the two of them and just make a regular knot in them.

Pull the knot tight.

Ignore this knot for now and keep knitting until you reach the final stitches. When you approach the stitches around the marker, they will not be very secure. Knit carefully and make sure you don’t accidentally pull the yarn out! When you reach about the third stitch on your second row, push the stitches on your needles back and look at the back side (inside) of your work again. Pull on both ends of yarn so they are nice and tight again and make sure the knot is tight as well.

First, put your row counter on 1 (you just finished the first row of your CC, remember?) so you won’t forget it. Then take a pair of scissors and cut the MC yarn so you are left with a bit of yarn about as long as the bit of CC (look at the pictures above to see how long my pieces are). Pick up your knitting and continue as usual!

If you are knitting the Original Design you just keep using the CC for 35 rows. If you want the Prisoner of Azkaban style, as I believe most of you do, you knit 4 rows of CC. Then you change colours again into your MC, using the method I just described. Knit 8 rows of MC and switch colours again. Yes, you will be getting a lot of practice switching colours if you want a scarf like this! For the second stripe you change back into your CC and knit 4 rows again. Then finally, you change to MC again and knit another 35 rows.

Remember to put your row counter to zero (or start counting on a new bit of paper/get your animals to move) every time you switch colours! Think of them as separate pieces of work.

You will notice it doesn’t look like your stripes align properly. This is nothing to worry about, that’s because we use the lazy method of changing colours and our knots are very loose. You won’t have to worry about them untying, but they will get a bit looser. If that happens, the stripes will start to look unaligned. Ignore that for now, we will fix that at the end when we are going to get rid of the loose ends on the back!

Of course, patterns are written in a lot of ways, depending on the designer. But if you would see this written down as a pattern, it would in most cases look something like this:

*Row 1-35 knit MC
Row 36-39 knit CC
Row 40-47 knit MC
Row 48-51 knit CC* repeat until desired length

See those *? For those of you who haven’t been properly introduced, that little star is called an asterisk. No, not like the friend of Obelix (you know, the big guy with the even bigger stones who fell in the cauldron when he was little?), that’s Asterix. This is an asterisk. In knitting patterns, those asterisks mean you are going to have to repeat the part that’s between them.

Sometimes people are lazy or the pattern is very long and they will not write ‘knit’ but just use ‘k’. Knitting is the opposite of purling, remember? If not, read the previous entry again! But then it would look like

*Row 1-35 k(MC)
Row 36-39 k(CC)
Row 40-47 k(MC)
Row 48-51 k(CC)* repeat until desired length

Of course a pattern like this looks quite uneventful, but I thought it might be useful to have seen a pattern once. Maybe it will seem less scary if you continue knitting after this project! Of course I will keep guiding you if you choose to follow this course, but maybe you’ve got a pattern of your own you want to try by then!

But, patterns aside, go change colours now and keep knitting!

If you aren’t sure about casting on a lot of stitches and just starting, you can always practise a little. I imagine most of you got that idea by yourself, but maybe not all of you have figured out the fastest way to do it.

Think about this for a moment: you can use circular needles as if they were straight needles. This may sound obvious, but I have found that for a lot of people, it isn’t. If you want to try to knit a few stitches before you start working on a full size scarf, just cast on about twenty stitches. Don’t join the yarn (you can’t with only twenty stitches, it won’t reach the other needle), just start knitting.

As you knit, you will be moving the stitches from the left needle to the right. This is exactly what you do while knitting in the round, but this time when you get to the last stitch, all of them will be on the right needle. What to do? You just switch needles! Take the right needle with all the stitches on it in your left hand and the left needle in your right hand. Ignore the string between them. See? You’re all ready to start knitting again! This is why I prefer to use circular needles even if I’m not knitting in the round. You can’t lose one of the needles because they’re attached to eachother and when you want to put it away for a moment, you can slide your work onto the string and it won’t slide off the needles. Also, circular needles are shorter than straight needles and they will fit in your bag without the risk of poking a hole in it.

If you have knitted a few rounds using the circulars as straight needles, you will see you’re not getting those pretty little v’s we talked about. Instead, your work will have little waves (I showed you those at the end of the previous entry, remember?). You’re only practising now so it doesn’t matter, but I will try to explain why this is. I am going to simplify this for now, but as we keep exploring the world of knitting together, you will learn everything I can teach you.

The word ‘knitting’ is a little confusing in English, because we use it to mean creating a knitted fabric. But for a knitter, it also means doing what you just learned in the previous entry. There is also a different, often used method of creating stitches, which is called purling. Purling is a kind of mirrored knitting.

When you knit, there is a right side and a wrong side. If you knit on the right side and ‘mirror knit’ (purl) on the wrong side, you get the pretty v’s on one side and the horizontal waves on the other side. Knitting like this (alternating knit and purl rows) is called stockinette stitch. But if you knit on both the right and wrong side, you’re doing exactly the same thing on both sides. That way you get waves on both sides. This is called garter stitch.

But why are you getting the v’s when you knit in the round (without purling)? Maybe you’ve figured that out already: when you knit in the round, you are always working on the right side. It doesn’t matter what you do on the wrong side, because you never get there! And that’s why, in the first entry, I told you knitting in the round would be easier. Learning to knit is confusing enough without learning to purl at the same time as well.

In this entry I have tried to show you a very tiny bit of the amount there is to learn if you want to. If you discover you enjoy knitting, stay with me after you finish this project. There is a lot more to learn and a lot of Potter-related projects to go. As long as you want to learn, I’ll teach!

So, keep on practising your horizontal waves and when you feel like it, start on your full size scarf!

PS Did you realise that if you have started this tutorial you can already do garter stitch? Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

Great to see you’re still with me! I hope you all managed to make sense of the last entry and figured out how to cast on some stitches. If not, let me know and I’ll see if I can help you! If you succeeded, that’s great! Now we’re going to knit. First, I’ll show you how knitting works on my own scarf. After that I’ll switch to a set of needles on which I just cast on some stitches and show exactly what you should do to get started and how many stitches you should cast on. Finally, there will be a video to show how it looks in motion.

When starting to knit, you will have two pieces of yarn. Remember casting on using the piece of yarn coming out of the skein and the long tail? Those two ends will be hanging out of the last stitch you cast on. From now on, you won’t need the tail. The working yarn, as we call that in knitting, is the piece that ends in the skein. To knit, you will need to hold the working yarn so you can make stitches. There are many ways to hold the yarn and if, after a while, you develop a method that’s different from how I do it, that’s fine! But for now, try this:

Wrap the yarn around your little finger

Now pick up the side nearest to the needles (not the side leading to the skein of yarn) with your index finger.

In these pictures I held the yarn very loose, but when you are knitting this grip will make sure the yarn stays nice and tight (not too tight though!) so you can make loops around the needles. So you’ll hold it like this:

Holding your work when you’ve already got a piece of fabric is far easier than just holding the empty needles. So I promise, it will get easier! Right now you’ll have to find a way to hold the needles without dropping them or poking your (or someone else’s!) eye out. I hold them with three fingers (pinky-, ring- and middle finger) around the needles, hold my thumbs on them and my index fingers somewhere over them. The right index finger is used to hold the yarn, the left one to make sure the loops on the left needle won’t escape. If I need to move the loops around on the needles I use my thumbs and index fingers, but you’ll figure out a way to hold all of it comfortably yourself after a while!

Don’t worry! My scarf did not disapparate. But I needed needles without a scarf on them to be able to show you how I hold them. Otherwise you would only see the scarf instead of my fingers.

Remember, I’ll show you how to start in a bit! For now, just watch what I’m doing and try to get a feel for how it should go. You’ll get to start soon enough.

Put the right needle through the first loop, from the left side of the stitch (that’s what those loops are called) to the right.

This picture looks confusing, doesn’t it? The right needle goes from right to left, but it goes from the left side of the STITCH to the right side of the stitch.

Using your right index finger, move the yarn to the other (left) side of the right needle. Make sure it’s just lying over the needle, not completely wrapped around it!

Keep this working yarn in place while you bring the left needle containing the loop over it until it slips over the point of the right needle.

Can you see there is a new loop on the right needle now? The only thing that’s left is to slide out the left needle and you’ve made a stitch!

One more time in close up to make sure you’ve got it. You probably don’t need the repeat, but I’m doing it anyway. Call the Department of Redundancy Department to complain.

Insert the needle.

Bring the yarn around.

Slide the stitch over the end of the right needle.

Pull the left needle out and you’re done!

All clear so far? Remember: if not, let me know! (Use the ask function, send me an email at yola.purpleprophecy@gmail.com or find me on twitter @PurpleProphecy)

I’ll repeat the steps again in a minute, but first you need to cast on enough stitches. How many do you need? It depends on many things. If you followed my lead exactly, you bought 40cm (15¾ inches) needles. In that case, you’ll probably need about a hundred stitches. Yes, I am serious. 100 of them. If you bought needles where the ‘string’ between them is longer than that, you’ll need even more. What you want is that the whole thing from needle to string to other needle if comfortably filled with stitches.

This picture is not exactly right because I just cast on to show you. I cast on just to be able to show you, so my stitches would be too far apart if I wanted to actually knit a pretty scarf.

The important part is that the stitches go from one point of the needle to the other, because after this you will have to join the ends to make a circle. Make sure the stitches are sitting comfortably next to eachother, not to close and not too far apart. It doesn’t really matter how many you have, but try to make it an amount you can remember, a nice round number like 90, 100 or 105. Also, write this amount down! You need to remember this number.

If you look closely, you will see that on one side of the cast on stiches there are the loops (the actual stitches) and on the other side there is a kind of ‘line’ of yarn connecting them.

Before you are going to join the ends together, you want to make sure all stitches are the right way up, with the loops on the ‘upside’ of the needle and the line connecting them on the other side. So the previous picture is good. And this is not:

You see the ‘line’ I just showed you is on one side first and twists around to the other side later? If you join the end while the cast on stitches are twisted like this, you will attempt to knit something like a Möbius band (you know, one of those circles where the outside and inside keep switching around. Google it if you’ve never heard of them). This will not end well.

Make sure all loops are pointing the same way with the ‘line’ connecting them on the downside of the needles when you pick them up.

You may have already figured out that once you join the ends and knit a few rounds (a round is when you have knitted all stitches once), it may become a bit hard to see exactly which stich is the first one. And if you don’t know which one you started at, you won’t be able to count how many rounds you’ve knitted or when you should switch colour!

So to make sure you know where you started, cut off a little piece of your contrast colour yarn. Make a knot in it so there’s a loop on the end. I use the same knot you used to start casting on, but every knot is fine. As long as you get a piece of yarn that looks approximately like this:

I know, my contrast colour should be black, not red. Well spotted. But I had a piece of red yarn lying around! All that matters is that it is a colour you can easily see so you won’t confuse this piece of yarn with your actual knitting.

Get your right needle (the one where the end of yarn is) and slide the marker you just made around it. See, now you know where you started when you get there again!

Take the other needle and start doing exactly what I just showed you. Yes, I am going to show you a third time. Stick the right needle through the first loop on the left needle, from left to right.

Bring the yarn around the left needle. Try to knit this first stitch extra tight!

Use the left needle to slide the loop off the right needle.

Pull out the left needle again and you’ve got your first stitch! Repeat. Repeat again. And again. And again. Keep repeating until you get to the end (you will know where this is because of the little piece of yarn you just put in front of your first stitch, remember?).

Try not to knit too tight! Beginners almost always knit too tight and when you do that, you are making it more difficult to get the right needle to go through the loops. If you are having trouble right from the start, you’ve probably cast on too tight. Try to cast on again and keep the loops loose this time!

When you get to the end you will probably see that the bit between the first and the last stitch doesn’t look pretty. There will be a huge gap there.

When you get to the last couple of stitches (and the first ones from the next round), try to knit a bit tighter. You won’t be able to close that gap now, but just ignore it. If you knit the stitches around it a bit tighter for a few rounds, it will go away. The tail from when you cast on will try to escape, but just grab and hold it while you make that stitch.

When you get to the piece of yarn in the contrast colour, treat it like a regular stitch at first. Slide the needle through the loop:

But now don’t wrap the yarn around, just pull out the left needle and leave the bit of yarn on the right needle.

See? I didn’t make a stitch, I just moved the bit of yarn from the left needle to the right. But now I know I have knitting all stitches once, so my first round is complete! When you reach your bit of contrast colour yarn, be sure to make note of the fact that you knitted the first round. If you own a stitch counter or use an app on your smartphone to count, put it to 1. If you don’t, take a piece of paper and make a mark on it. If you chose to train animals to move over after every round, tell the first one to move now.

Congratulations! You’ve knitted your first round! Now for the very important part: count your stitches. I know, that’s boring and you want to keep knitting. But trust me, count them after every round. Keep doing this until you’ve come up with the same number every time for about fifteen rounds. Or keep counting even after that, if that makes you feel more secure. Just make sure you still have the same amount of stitches you started with.

If you are a beginner, there will be a moment when you suddenly have (at least) one too many or too few. Very soon after this one, I will put up another entry to tell you what you should do if that happens.

Now start knitting the second round. Remember, knit the first couple of stitches very tightly for the first five or six rounds!

Really pull on the yarn to make the first stitch (the one after your contrast colour marker) nice and tight!

A few things you should remember:

1 After every round, make sure you still have the same number of stitches you started with!

2 When bringing the yarn around to make a stitch, make sure you don’t wrap it around the left needle more than once. This way you will make one real stitch and one ‘fake’ stitch and you will end up with more stitches than you started with.

3 When not trying to create a stitch, make sure you keep the yarn on the right side of the work! Don’t accidentally wrap it around between stitches. You will make ‘fake’ stitches this way.

4 The ‘right’ side of the work will look like this after a few rounds. Notice the little v’s:

The ‘wrong’ side will look like this. Notice the little waves:

Every time your pick up your work and start to knit, make sure the right side is on the outside, facing you. The wrong side should stay on the inside.

5 If you accidentally let one or more loops slip off the needles and you have knitted less than five rounds, just start over. I could try to explain how to fix it, but with only a few rounds done it’s hardly worth the effort of fixing. And since you’re a beginner, you are probably knitting too tight and it will be nearly impossible to fix. If you have knitted more than five rounds, let me know or wait for the next entry.

Finally, as promised, a video to show all the steps in motion:

One last thing: stop when you have knitted 35 rounds. On the 36th you will need to switch colours. I will post a tutorial on how to do this very soon!

If you have any questions, be sure to ask them! Soon, I’ll put up an entry to help you out if you made a mistake. If you manage to start making mistakes sooner than that, just let me know and I’ll help you correct it. Or start over and think of it as extra practice.

For now, good luck and happy knitting!

It’s time to finally get started! Exciting, isn’t it? In this tutorial I’m going to teach you to cast on. When you look at a knitting work in progress, you’ll see there are lots of tiny loops on the needle. But to get started, you have to get as many loops as you need onto your needle. This is called casting on. There are many different ways to do this, but I’m going to teach you the method I prefer. It looks complicated at first, but I’m sure you will get the hang of it! And if you don’t, there will be a video at the end.

First, you take your first skein of MC yarn (that’s main colour, remember?). So if you were a Hufflepuff, like I am, you’d start with a skein of yellow. Now, you’re going to need a long ‘tail’ of yarn to cast on. How long this end needs to be depends on the project you’re starting, but for now just take a long end. It doesn’t matter if it ends up being too long. In these pictures I use a fairly short ‘tail’ myself because you will be able to see which end is which.

Lay down the skein of yarn somewhere on your lap, a bit out of the way. Now stick out two fingers on your left hand and drape the yarn over it, like this:

Now pull the yarn back towards you under your fingers. Your left hand should just be sitting there, let your right hand do all the work!

This isn’t that hard, right? Good! Now pick up the yarn and bring it back over your fingers again, crossing  over the yarn that’s already there so you make an x.

Now for the exciting part where you get to use your knitting needles. In this tutorial I use a straight needle because I think it will be better for showing what I’m doing, but if you’re going to knit a House Scarf you should have circular needles. They work exactly the same as the one I’m using here, but the other needle will of course be attached to it by the piece of string between them. You will only need to use one needle for this step, so ignore the other one. Just make sure you won’t poke yourself with it.

So, take your knitting needle and stick it under the first strand on the upside of the x you just made with the yarn, then over the second strand.

Now your left hand is going to be doing something too. Grab the yarn so it won’t slide of your fingers. As you can see in the next picture, I hold one piece in place with my thumb and the other end with my pinky and ring finger kind of curled around it. Hold it whichever way you like, as long as it won’t be able to escape.

Now you’re holding the yarn with your left hand and the knitting needle in your right. Kind of curl your left pointer- and middle finger (the ones the yarn is wrapped around) inwards, like this:

Complete the motion so your hand makes a fist and the knitting needle is resting on top of your closed fingers. Make sure the needle goes through the loop you made in the first step!

Free your fingers from the yarn. You’ll have a loop around your needle now and it should look like this:

If you want to be sure you did it right, take the loop off the needle and pull on one end. The ‘knot’ should just disappear. If it doesn’t and it forms a real knot in the yarn, you did something wrong. If it disappeared, good job! Go do it again!

Now you have your first loop, but of course this is way too big. It will slide right of your needle! So now you pull on the ‘tail’ (the end that doesn’t end in the skein of yarn) to make it a little smaller. Make sure not to pull too tightly! You want to be able to slide the loop around on the needle with ease.

But we want more loops. However, the method we used just now only works for the first one. The next loops are made differently. Keep holding the needle in your right hand. The ‘tail’ should be on your side, the long end (with the skein of yarn) on the other. If you followed my instructions this should already be the case.

Use your right pointer finger to keep the loop you just made in place. Now take the long end of the yarn and place your left pointer finger against it so that the yarn is resting behind your finger. Try to hold the end somehow. I hold it between my middle- and ring finger, as you can see in the picture.

Now put your thumb against the other end, the tail, and hold the other end between your middle- and ring finger as well. The yarn now forms a kind of triangle between your fingers.

Here comes the hardest part to explain. It’s really easy when you get the hang of it, but very hard to explain right. Just be patient with me and keep trying, okay? You will get it suddenly and it will seem the easiest thing in the world.

In the next picture I have numbered the bits of yarn. If the picture seems to small on your monitor, it’s 1-2-3 from top to bottom.

You see the space between strands 2 and 3? Move your needle towards you, past strand number 3, and bring your needle up from under that space. By doing this you will catch strand 3 on your needle.

Now, with strand 3 on your needle, move the needle away from you over strand 1. Then bring the needle back under strand 1, catching that one as well.

Bring the needle (still holding strands 1 and 3) back through the loop strands 2 and 3 are making.

Free your fingers from the yarn and tug on both ends of the yarn until the loop sits next to the first one, looking exactly the same.

Well done! You did it! Now go do it a few times more. If you didn’t get it right at first, don’t despair. Just start over and try again. Don’t pull the loops too tightly, you still have to be able to move them around on the needle with ease! Oh, and remember: if you want to be sure you got it right, pull the needle out of the row of loops you created and pull on the yarn. The loops should just vanish without any knots. This way you can use the same yarn to practise a few times until you get it.

If you did it right, you probably noticed this way of casting takes a lot of time. That’s why I sometimes use a slightly different method where I keep my fingers where they are and move my entire hand around the needle and pull tight by extending my left pointer finger and thumb. Or you can hold your left hand still and move the needle between the strands. If this explanation doesn’t make sense to you, watch this video to see what it looks like in motion:

If you see me poking myself it’s because I was paying more attention to the camera than to what I was doing!

Did you manage to cast on a few stitches? Let me know on twitter! If you didn’t, be sure to let me know and I will try to help you! In the next entry we are finally going to start knitting, but for now I’ll give you a bit of time to go buy your equipment and practise casting on.

Have fun and try not to resemble a plate of spaghetti too much!

In the next 24 hours I will post the first real tutorial in which you are going to get started. This will obviously contain a lot of information, so I wanted to tell you a few things now there’s still room for it in your head:

You are going to make mistakes. Many more of them than you may think you will. You are going to make mistakes you didn’t even know you could make. And that’s fine. Making mistakes is not a bad thing. Mistakes are the things that make you understand what you are doing instead of simply following instructions.

Sometimes fixing the mistake takes more time than just starting over. That’s the bad news. But there is good news as well: almost every mistake can be fixed! So if you run into something you think can’t be right, just let me know! You can use the ‘ask’ button or send me an email at yola.purpleprophecy@gmail.com. Don’t be afraid to ask! There are a lot of stupid questions and I’ve asked all of them. Multiple times. So who am I to judge, right?

I could go on about all the mistakes you could make for hours, but I’m going to save that for when you have started and understand what I’m talking about. But there is one mistake I’ve seen every beginner make (made it myself as well):

You’re  going to have a certain number of stitches on your needles. If you want to knit something rectangular, like a scarf, this number should be the same after every row you knit (a row is when you have knitted all stitches on your needle once and are back to the first one where you started). If the number of stitches you have is different every time, you will probably knit something like a trapezium. Even if you count your stitches regularly you’ll sometimes end up with more or less of them than you started with, but if you notice it straight away you can fix it. If you only notice after ten rows, you’ll end up with a trapezium. A scarf does not look like that.

I will say this many times in the coming weeks, but remember:

If you don’t understand something it’s not your fault. You’re not dumb or anything. If you don’t understand something, I didn’t explain well enough!

Count. Your. Stitches. After. Every. Row.

When you go to the store, you will probably encounter these things somewhere in the knitting supplies area:

These are stitch/row counters. You can use them to, well, count rows and stitches. I didn’t tell you to buy one of them in the shopping list in the previous post because you don’t really need them. If you have the money (they’re cheap) you can of course buy them, but there are a lot of other things you can do to count how far along you are which are cheaper or easier:

You can, for example, just write a little line on a bit of paper for every row. Or, for true prison-style, carve a line in your wall. I’d stick to the paper though.

If you happen to own a smartphone you can also use an app to count one row every time you touch the screen.  I like the android app ‘county’ very much, but there are lots of them for all kinds of devices.

If you’re not that tech savvy there is of course always the good old abacus.

Or you could train small animals to stand in a line and move over when you tell them to. You could do this with larger animals as well, but if you have the kind of garden where you can move multiple elephants around, you can buy a scarf or pay someone to knit for you.

So, it’s up to you if you want to buy a counter or not. I tend to lose them myself, but if you’re more organized than me, go for it! However, I have a proposition for you. If you are planning on knitting a scarf, you can let me know now and when you are done and send me a photo of the final result, I’ll send you a beaded counter in your house colours as a reward (and you’ll have your finished House Scarf too! So that’s two rewards, really). There are, of course, a few things to consider (did you notice I like listing things?):

First, you must be a member of the amazing Pottermore Family. If you are, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not, go to twitter and look for #PottermoreFamily. You’ll meet lots of awesome, kind and caring people. It’s worth it! Send me a DM on twitter (I’m @PurpleProphecy) to let me know you want in on this and I’ll add you to my list.

Second, this offer is only available until 30 September. You don’t even have to be started by then (though I hope you will be!), but you will have to send me the DM before 1 October. I don’t like it either, but I have to draw a line somewhere. I don’t want to be sending out counters the rest of my life!

Third, you have to be willing to send me a picture of your scarf (with or without you) when you’re done so I can post it on my blog as an inspiration for others. And of course you have to let me know where to send the counter. If you’re not comfortable with giving me your address, I can’t get your reward to you. If you’re under sixteen, ask your parents for permission!

Of course, I won’t hold you to it. It’s not a promise you’ll finish the scarf. It’s just a nice little thing for people who do complete this project. Just because I like all of you awesome people in the Pottermore Family so much and because you have been so kind and interested when I started this course!

In the previous entry I talked about yarn. If you haven’t read that post, go do it now. I’ll wait. Ready? Good. Now you know all about yarn. However, there is something else that should be on your shopping list: knitting needles. They are not only important because you need them to knit, but also because they are a big influence on the amount of yarn you will need. I’ll explain this in a second. First I want to warn you: this is going to be very long. Maybe you want to make yourself a nice cup of tea first. If you don’t drink tea you may want to start the habit now. Knitting and a hot cup of tea go amazingly well together!

In knitting, there is something we call the ‘knitting gauge’, which refers to how loose or tight you knit. Even if two knitters both use the same yarn and the same needles, it’s still very likely they will end up with slightly different outcomes.  This can happen because some people knit very tightly with the yarn so tight around their needles they’re hardly able to move it around. Other people will have their yarn around their needles in very loose loops. As long as it works for you, both of these extremes (and everything in between) are good. But you will understand that if your knitting is very tight, you will need less yarn. Makes sense, right? (Don’t worry if it doesn’t, when we get to the actual knitting part you’ll understand what I’m talking about here!)

For now we won’t bother about individual knitting gauges, but I just wanted to mention it to make you understand why you might get a slightly different length of scarf than another knitter. More important than your gauge however, are the needles you use. I’m sure all of you have, at one point in your life, seen knitting needles. They are the long, pointy things that make grannies exceptionally dangerous people to cross. Most often they are made out of metal (often aluminium) or wood (bamboo). Personally, I prefer metal needles because you can move the yarn around on them more easily. And wood/bamboo tends to be pricier. But of course it’s just my preference and you’re free to choose for yourself. But when in doubt, use metal for now. You can try wood later.

But why do the needles matter when you want to know how much yarn to buy? That’s because of the size. There is no standard size knitting needle like there is a standard size cauldron. What size you want depends on two things:

First, the yarn you use. As you will see on your trip to the shop, there are many kinds of yarn. Some are very thin and others look more like rope than like yarn. If you use very large needles with very thin yarn, you’ll knit a fishing net. Which is good if you want to catch yourself some freshwater plimpies I guess, but not if you want to knit a nice fabric.

Second, the desired end result. If look at a piece of knitting, you see a lot of tiny v-shapes. The larger your knitting needles are, the larger these v’s will look. The Hogwarts scarves are knitted in fairly small v’s, but if you don’t care about your scarf being an exact replica you can make larger v’s if you prefer.

To make matters complicated for me, there are many different ways to measure the size of a knitting needle. In Europe, they use the diameter of the needle in mm. In the UK and Canada every size has a number with the largest number being the smallest needle. In the US it’s exactly the other way around: a larger number means a larger needle. Whenever I mention a needle size I’ll try to remember to mention all three sizes!

Knitting needle sizes range from very thick to very thin. The thin ones are a bit flimsy, so if you are a tight knitter, they can (and probably will) bend. This doesn’t matter at all for the end result, but it looks a bit funny.

There is another kind of knitting needle many of you probably don’t know about and they look like this:

These are called circular needles and they are used to knit ‘in the round’. This is exactly what you think it is: you knit a round kind of tube with them instead of a thin, flat piece of fabric. So when you lay the work down flat, you’ll have a thicker, double layered piece of fabric. These needles are what we are going to use for our scarf. This is for a number of reasons:

First, in knitting there is always a ‘right’ side and a ‘wrong’ side. I will explain this when we get to the actual knitting, but for now you just have to know the wrong side of your work isn’t as pretty as the right side. It’s also the side where you can see where you switched colours. When knitting in the round, the wrong side is on the inside of the tube, so you won’t see it.  

Second, because you are making a double layered piece of fabric, it will feel warmer and cozier. That’s nice when it starts freezing again!

Third (and last), it’s easier. I won’t go into detail explaining why right now, but it is way easier.

When you are shopping for supplies, look for this kind of circular needles. As you can see in the picture above, it has two short needles with a bit of string in between. As you may have noticed, the length of this bit of string may vary. Imagine, you are knitting a round tube. The longer this string is, the bigger the diameter of the tube will be. And, when you lay your work down on a table the end result will be wider. For example, for this scarf I use one that’s 40cm (about 15¾  inches). If I lay it down, my scarf will be approximately 20cm (about 8 inches) wide. You can of course use a larger circular needle if you like. Just remember: the final product will be about half the width of the size you choose!

For reference, this is the scarf I’m knitting. It will be about 200cm (6ft 7in) when it’s done:

Yay Hufflepuff! It really is yellow, I promise. The light is very bad in this photo.

Remember the tiny v’s I mentioned earlier? You can see them in this picture! I think this size looks most like the scarves in the movie. I’m using knitting needles size 3mm (EU), 11 (UK/Canada) and 2 or 3 (US). People in the US, I’m sorry, but 3mm doesn’t exist in your sizes! Your size 2 will be a tiny bit smaller and your size 3 a tiny bit larger than 3mm. It’s up to you, but when in doubt, try the bigger size. It’s a bit easier when you’re learning.

So, with all this in mind here’s your shopping list:

Circular knitting needles, size 3mm(EU)/11(UK&Canada)/2 or 3(US), 40cm (about 15¾ inches)

Remember: if you want a scarf that’s larger than mine, buy bigger needles!

Yarn, preferably 100% acrylic, 8 skeins of your MC, 2 skeins of your CC. If you want to knit an Original design scarf, you should buy about 5 skeins MC and 5 skeins CC.

Remember: if you buy bigger needles, you should get a bit more yarn! If you want your scarf to measure less than 200cm (6ft 7in) you should get less yarn.

 If you’ve got the money, buy one of these as well:

It’s a crochet hook. Besides crochet, they are used to correct mistakes in knitting. They aren’t expensive and it will be very useful and save you a lot of time when you inevitably make a mistake. You should get one the same size as your  knitting needles or even smaller. The size doesn’t really matter, as long as you don’t get one that’s bigger than your needles. I will explain how you are going to use them in a later post.

For now, happy shopping!

The idea of this course is that you will learn to knit while working on Harry Potter themed projects. The first one is the one I think will be the most popular: the Hogwarts House Scarf. If you don’t want to knit a scarf you’ll just have to ignore the bits where I talk about that and knit whatever you like. But if you have never knitted before, I’d advise you to follow my lead and start a scarf.

Before you can start you will obviously need to go shopping. First, you need yarn. I always use 100% acrylic because real wool is ITCHY. Just take my word for it, you don’t want real wool around your neck. You’ll go crazy. Acrylic won’t itch and, also important, it’s cheaper than real wool. But if you want to use something else, be my guest!

See? The ‘packaging’ will tell you what kind of yarn it is!

As you know the Hogwarts scarves have two colours. In knitting we call this the main colour (MC) and the contrast colour (CC). In this tutorial I will be knitting a Prisoner of Azkaban style scarf. If you want to knit the Original design scarves from the first two movies, you’ll need yarn in a lighter colour (see the movies for reference) and you will need to buy more of the contrast colour.

But how much yarn do you need? Well, that depends on what kind of yarn and needles you choose, so I can’t exactly tell you. For my scarf (I’ll get back to that later) I’ve bought eight skeins (that’s what you call a ball of yarn) of my MC and two of my CC. Now that I’m knitting I actually don’t expect to use the second skein of CC, but it can be hard to judge how much yarn you need. So why buy more than you think you need? Well, have you ever seen a yellow or pink or red sheep? They have to dye the yarn and sometimes one batch is just a tad different from another. It’s not always a problem, but sometimes it differs so much, it will look like you have been knitting in two different colours. You don’t want that, obviously!

I’ve made the mistake. You try not to!

Somewhere on the ‘packaging’ of the yarn it will say what colour ‘number’ it is and the batch it came from. Try to find as many from the same batch as possible, but if you can’t, make sure you can’t see the difference in colour!

Farbe meaning ‘colour’ and partie meaning ‘batch’

Incidentally, this is also why you always hear about knitters with a giant stash of yarn. Most stores will let you return complete skeins if you bought too much, but most knitters prefer to keep it because ‘it will come in handy someday’.

In the next post, I’ll talk about knitting needles. Stay tuned!

If you’re a Potterhead you’ve probably always wanted to own at least a Hogwarts House Scarf, but maybe even a complete set of school robes and other Harry Potter related items. So you went shopping and found out those things are pretty expensive, but maybe you bought a scarf anyway.

Then Pottermore came along and you were sorted in another house. Now what?!

That’s where I come in. It doesn’t matter if the above happened or if you’re just a Harry Potter fan who’d like to learn to knit. You know what, you don’t even have to be a Potterhead to follow this course. Though I should admit it will help if you are, because there is a lot of Harry Potter related knitting about to come your way.

I have been knitting for over five years now and every time I share a project online, people are asking me if they can place an order. But I don’t have the time to make everyone happy! And, more importantly, if you happen to like knitting, it could become a hobby to last you a lifetime. Who wouldn’t want that?

So keep an eye on this page, tutorials are about to start coming your way. At first, it will only be photo-tutorials while I figure out how to make good, clear, videos. But, eventually, the plan is to use video-tutorials as well. In the meantime, don’t be afraid to ask if you need help!

Happy knitting!