Really Clear - Provisional cast on

I'm going to show you an easy method to do a provisional cast on. What you do is start out by chaining a few stitches with a crochet hook. We're just doing the chain to get things started. So, 2...3... stitches--that's good enough. Then you get out your knitting needle, and you keep the crochet hook on the right, the yarn behind, and the knitting needle on the left. Once you've got that going, you go over with the crochet hook, you grab the yarn from below, pull it through the loop, If you have trouble pulling yarn through a loop, keep your crochet hook face down as you do it. Go through, DOWN, and that should get you through that loop. You're going with the yarn now from front to back as if you're purling to knitting. Through...and back. From below, through, and back. I'll do one more. Now what I'm going to do is just chain a few stitches to get things out of the way. I don't need my crochet hook anymore. I'm going to snip the yarn. And I can, for security, if I want, put this piece of yarn through the top loop. Don't snug it, though. Later on you're going to want to pull it out. I'm going to tie a knot at this end, so that I know that later this is the end that I use to take out. Now I've got these on, and i'm going to use yarn and start knitting. Let me do a couple of rows so you can see where we're going with all of this. I usually start by looping it over and puling it through. Isn't this exciting watching me knit? I can go down and film my laundry going around next. Okay. Let's cast this off... The blue yarn here is the yarn that I'm using for my garment, and the purple yarn is the contrasting yarn that I chose--and I forgot to cast off! Let's do it now! The purple yarn is a contrasting yarn that I chose so that you would see a contrast. Okay. So now I've got this. And I know from my knotted area that that's the side that I want to pull. And I know that I've pulled it through this chain. So I'm going to take this out. Now my chain will just pop off. And voila! I have live stitches.... Let's continue on to get the actual voila! There we go. Now I have 4 lives stitches. I can put my knitting needle through them. If you have more stitches than 4, you're probably going to want to put your knitting needle into them as you pop off. But that's how you do a provisional cast on. It's real easy, and I think you should do it more often! www.reallyclear.com