Nine times out of ten, when I cast on for a project, I use a basic long-tail cast on.  But sometimes, if the Knitting Gods so move me, and if the project is really special, I like to break out my Tubular Cast-On.

(I’m using it for my Stellar’s Jay Sweater.)

It’s absolutely gorgeous, especially paired with fine ribbing (it’s perfect with a 1×1 ribbing on sock cuffs).  Properly executed, it looks like the stitches on the front of the piece simply swoop around the edge and continue on the back.

And (double bonus!), it is super stretchy, so you don’t have to worry about weird tension issues that sometimes happen at cast-on edges.

There are a couple ways to do it, which have all been written about online many, many (many) times.

The way I learned, is apparently the “Italian Way.” Who would have thought?  There’s a great tutorial for it here.

There’s another way to do a tubular cast on, that frankly, looks much easier, but I haven’t tried it, so you’ll have to give it a shot and let me know how it goes.  Here‘s a tutorial that looks pretty good.

What kinds of cast-ons do you like?