There's nothing magic about Judy.

This my friends, is a picture of success.

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This is my first successful attempt at using Judy's Not-So-Magical Cast on. I picked up a copy of Socks from the Top Up today at Barnes and Noble (I had a gift card to use up). I had every intention of buying New England Knits but I talked myself out of it because realistically, it's going to be months before I work up the gumption to knit up that gorgeous sweater on the cover. But socks? I can do socks now and they would make great airplane knitting. And toe up would be a nice new challenge. I liked the look of most of the socks in the book so I went with it instead.  Well after spending most of the day working on Manda's Something Lacy I wanted something new (I'm still working on the lace back and after 4.5 repeats I'm a little bored with it) so I decided to try one of the toe up socks from the book. I wound up 2 balls of Lorna's Laces in Clara's Garden and picked out a pattern.

That was the easy part. The pattern calls for casting on either with the Turkish Cast On, Figure Eight or Judy's Magic cast on. None of them looked appealing to me but I decided to try Judy's Magic Cast On since it seemed to be the easiest and most useful to know. I do long tail cast on all of the time, this should be a piece of cake! Right?

Wrong. 1 hour and 3 you tube videos later (including one very annoying Cat Bordhi clip) and I was incredibly annoyed and baffled. No matter how many times I replayed the videos and went through it step by step all I wound up with was a series of unknittable yos on both needles. I never have this much trouble trying to learn knitting trick with videos to follow but for some reason this cast on baffled me.

I finally stumbled upon this blog post with a slightly different version of the cast on  and after 2 tries it finally clicked! Turning it upside down and following her clearly written out instructions made all of the difference in the world. I highly recommend this technique if you have any trouble learning Judy's Magic Cast On. I still don't quite understand what was going wrong before but as long as I can memorize this method I could be fine for knitting socks toe up.

On another note, Lorna's Laces is so incredibly soft. I cannot wait to put these socks on my feet.