It is accomplished

Okay, that’s a bit grandiose for a glorified swatch - after all it’s not like I finished a sweater or even some fancy cabled socks. However, I did manage a proper double knit möbius, and I’m feeling pretty darn special. A quick recap: when last we visited this challenge I had noticed that the cast on for the moebius loop had an unfortunate perforated effect right down the center when double knitting.

My first thought was that I had simply been too sloppy in my cast on and that the problem would be solved by being careful not to cross the yarns. After all, I had done a standard MCO with two yarns instead of one, and I wasn’t at all particular about how the yarns twisted. If I were diligent about how I wrapped the yarns, that should solve the problem, right?

Goes to show there’s a sucker born every minute. I should have known it wouldn’t be that straightforward. I won’t bore you with my various trials - wrapping the yarns in different directions, reordering the stitches, etc. Suffice it to say, I came thisclose to deciding that the best solution would be to knit the darn thing flat and sew up the seams. I hate to seam. Seaming is not an option. I pressed on.

I didn’t want to abandon the MCO. As cast on’s go, it’s fast enough to offset the innate fiddliness of a möbius cast-on. After all, in the end, I had to actually want to knit the thing without feeling I was being punished for crimes against craft. The problem was that the very nature of the cast on meant the yarns had to cross each other for it to work. In fact, in all the two color cast ons I came across, the colors twisting together was a desired decorative effect. What I wanted was two separate fabrics starting in the middle, with full control over when I chose to cross my colors. I decided to look to another bit of stunt knitting for inspiration, the two-socks-at-once technique. And the answer came. Clean and simple as the best solutions usually are.

Now the technique in the Knitty article won’t work exactly, or at least, adding the twist for the möbius complicated it beyond the level I was prepared to think about the problem. The idea is the same, though. Essentially, those two socks are cast on separately, the stitches alternated. While they are knit at the same time, they are NOT KNIT TOGETHER. I was casting two layers on together, and expecting them to separate, which wasn’t going to happen. So I kept my MCO, but instead of casting my two colors together, I cast them separately, and then merged them onto one needle.

Halfway through the cast on:

Voilà, two separate fabrics, a double knit möbius that allows you to cross the colors when you choose, not when dictated by the cast on.

Nice and smooth.

All things considered, once I figured out a solution, the execution was not as convoluted as I was starting to fear it would be. The most tricky parts were counting the number of stitches, and navigating the the section where the twist occurs. On my first attempt I wound up knitting the second half inside out. After the cast on, the knitting cruises along.

With that, I think that my swatching jones is officially over. Time to actually make something… finished.