For those times when you can’t have a teacher by your side, here are tips and techniques that I hope you’ll find helpful. Say you’ve heard about knitting in the ends as you go. How on earth do you do that? Or you want to cast on for a stitch pattern that calls for both knit and purl stitches. Check out the links and descriptions below for the answer!

TIPS ONLINE:
One of the nifties sites for bits of tips and techniques is Knitting Universe’s Athena. You can perform a search or look up given categories. Up pops all kinds of tidbits from their extensive database.

CAST ON TECHNIQUES:
The Purl Long Tail Cast On is a great way to cast on for a pattern that uses both knits and purls. This is my favorite way to cast on ribbing for socks and sweaters. Thanks to Jennifer and her pieKnits blog!

WHAT TO DO WITH THE ENDS:
Do you get tired of weaving in a lot of ends? I love to knit in ends as I go, especially when doing fair isle patterns. Here’s a very nice YouTube video that demonstrates “Knitting in ends“.

BEFORE YOU START:
Don’t you just hate it when something has gone awry as you’re knitting a pattern and you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong, and then you finally figure out the pattern has a mistake in it? Here are two suggestions that have worked well for me:

1. Before starting a pattern, do a search by pattern name, or go to the publisher’s web site, and check for corrections or errata.
2. When I get a book, or give one as a gift, I always look for corrections. I print the page of corrections and clip them to the inside of the book. For books I’m keeping, I mark up the patterns that have corrections. That way I know about the corrections as soon as I turn to the page.