Quick knitting question: counting cast-on stitches

[afuna]

So I'm doing the long tail cast on, as per knittinghelp.com. The very first stitch gives me two loops. Do I count that as one stitch, or two?

Google leads me to articles telling me not to count the slipknot, but since this isn't a slipknot, and I'm not sure what a slipknot looks like, I kinda really don't know.


And in other news, I finally finished my first thingy! It's a pastel candy-colored rectangular cloth (I ran out of yarn to make it squarer), complete from cast-on to bind-off, and I have just spent the past several minutes tugging at it with happy satisfaction :)

Comments

[synecdochic]

Yes, the first loop in long-tail is two stitches!

Also, the first row of long-tail cast-on is the first knitted row, so if you have a pattern where that matters, count that one.

[afuna]

Oh yay, it's coming together in my mind now.

Re: counting knitted rows

That reminds me. I'm doing the stockinette washcloth in your beginner's knitting entry, and I found that I'm purling when I see the back/bar and knitting when I see the V.

I think I counted the cast-on as row #1 -- could counting/not counting it been what caused me to go against the directions? *curious*

[synecdochic]

Nope! You're doing it correctly: for stocking stitch, the V means 'knit' and the bar means "purl" in order to make the stocking stitch fabric.

If you have a Ravelry account, look at this project, which is actually a bunch of projects together -- third picture down, the pink washcloths, the top one is garter stitch and the bottom one is the stocking stitch washcloth with seed stitch border that's close to what I wrote out in that entry. (I got bored, so the middle of the stocking stitch has some purl stitches to add the boxes, and the border is seed stitch, not garter stitch.)

[afuna]

That is so neat! (Well, all of them are :) ). I think I cannot wait to be able to try seed stitch :x

And thank you - I was reading it the other way around in the beginner's entry, and I was puzzled over why whatever I was doing worked. (And now I know *laughs*)

[synecdochic]

Seed stitch is doing the opposite of the stitch beneath: knit the bars and purl the Vs, and you get seed stitch. Same concept, different arrangement of stitches.

(All knitting is just knits and purls! It's just a question of what order you do them in, and whether you do other things along with them.)