Then I came home from Michael's and got out some vintage white yarn and use the smallest loom to experiment. I had a coupon for 20-percent off my entire purchase (no, I did not buy yarn). I am going to be teaching knitting to kids this summer, so I wanted to see if I want to include loom knitting in my classes, and 2. Well, yesterday, I bought a set of circular knitting looms at Michaels for two reasons: 1. I don't particularly like twisted stitches, even as mock cables. The Shirley Paden sweater that I want to make this year has columns of twisted ribs in it, and although I understand that she and others do this to make the single rib look like a cable, I can pretty much guarantee that when I knit that sweater, I'll change that detail. Maybe it's because I'm a Continental Combination knitter and I had to learn very early to compensate so that my stitches would not twist, but I can spot a twisted stitch a mile away, and frankly, I don't like them. I was afraid the twists were required to keep the loops under control and fill in the space between the pins.Then, the loom manufacturers tell you to continue wrapping the yarn around each pin, pole, nail (whatever you want to call it) and to continue flipping the lower wrapped loop around the upper one. The looms have their pins farther apart, and I wasn't sure what was going to happen to the fabric they produce. The one caveat was that those spool dolls had the pins a lot closer together. You still flip the yarn over the pins as you go.

What I was taught in the 50s was that after you wrap all the yarn individually around the pins in the cast-on, you just wrap the yarn around the outside of all the pins in the subsequent rows. It's a little easier to control on the spool or loom, but it does come out loose. This technique produces a very loose cast-on, and frankly, I don't like it because it's very difficult to control the tension on the needles.

When I learned to spool knit back in the 50s, we looped the yarn around each pin/nail in the first round, which is identical to the backwards-e cast-on that I intensely dislike if you are needle-knitting. Emily Kubin, founder of Emily's Hats for Hope, uses looms to make hats, and she can make a hat in about 2 hours (for comparison, I take about 4 hours to knit one.) You're limited in the range of stitches on a loom, but if you want something quick, or if you have trouble with needles, loom knitting is a good option. Generally, I see people using them for hats. They're usually rings, but sometimes are rectangles, and you wind the yarn around them and loop one round of yarn over the next round and produce whatever you want. Then, in my adulthood, I noticed that crafts stores and now yarn shops are selling 'looms' which use the same principle, but they're bigger. Most loom knitters who don't knit on needles don't even realize it, but the way the loom manufacturers teach you to use their looms gives you twisted stitches on every row. However, (here's the technical part), I have avoided loom knitting because something about the way everyone is teaching it really bothers me. You even can buy modern versions of them at the Lion Brand Outlet up in Carlstadt. A lot of my knitting friends today who are about my age remember those spool dolls fondly. Back in my childhood, we coiled that yarn to make doll hats and doll rugs. This created a long knitted tail which today we call the icord (I have no idea where that name came from). What I and my friends did with such dolls is wrap yarn around the nails and use a stick of some kind (maybe a tiny crochet hook) to lift the yarn around the nails up over more yarn around the nails. When I was about 5 or 6, my first introduction to knitting was a little spool doll with five nails sticking up on the top of her head. If you've never knitted on a loom, you might think I'm a little nuts to even write this.

Backwards loop cast on