I can do basic cast on (two needles) and thumb and index fingers cast on (one needle), but I thought I would never be able to figure out how to do Figure Eight CO (3 needles) in this life. I heard about it from several sock projects which were mostly required to work from toe up to the cuff. I only know how to do in the opposite way, from cuff to toe, so I thought…en…that would be interesting to learn something new, so I tried, following the instructions from the Internet and Knitty.com. But guess what? It looked so complicated, and I couldn’t understand their photo demonstration at all, no matter how hard I tried. So I gave up.

However, today I had a big motivation to pick it up again as I wanted to knit a pair of socks for my husband. The pattern I chose for him needs me to use toe-up figure 8 co technique. So I had to stand up from where I fell off I looked at the different resources from the Internet again, and found Hello Yarn is offering a very practical and understandable tutorial for this technique. In that tutorial, Adrian almost had covered all the details that related to make a successful Figure 8 CO, and the photos were taken so clearly that there was almost nothing I could think of that would affect a knitter to get it done. So I really want to credit this website and say “thank you” to Adrian. (The photo at the left above is from http://spellingtuesday.com/.)

Anyway, I still practised a couple of times before I finally made it. It was such an amazing thing to see what it came up with two needles and the yarn wrapped around them. And the final thing looked so smooth and smart that made me can’t wait to try it on more projects. I guess this is how the knitting stuff works on me and grows on me. The deeper you dig, the more fun you will get

A couple of little things that you might be interested to know:

1) When you flip your work on your left hand for 180 degree, make sure after the flipping, the bottom needle is on the top where the top needle was. And this moment, the yarn end connecting the yarn ball is at the bottom needle at the right side;.

2) After you finish the figure 8 co, there will be no loose yarn end hanging on your needles. Both ends of stitches should be tight and tidy, no need for you to hold them any more with extra effort.

3) Don’t rush to split your stitches into 3 or 4 needles. You might find it much easier to do so after you have enough stitches for a round, like more than 50 stitches in total. So keep knitting with 3 needles until you feel comfortable enough to split the stitches into more needles.

Happy knitting:-)