MOL knitters

Those are definitely compelling arguments for me to go back into Ravelry and figure out how to use it better. I've never been able to figure out a good way to search for a pattern for a yarn that I already own, rather than finding a pattern and then buying yarn specifically for it.

I used to knit. But I knit left handed, so reading instructions and learning new stitches from books was next to impossible. I figured I was going to spend my life stuck doing only scarves with variations of knit/purl. But then Mergele was nice enough to meet me for coffee at Cafe Meow (that's how long ago it was) and taught me some new stitches, and even started me on a shawl.

Then I had a baby. Every time I pick up my knitting needles now he runs straight for the yarn and try to yank it off. I swear he must have knitting radar, because even when napping he'll wake up if I try to knit and go after the yarn. I've since forgotten the new stitches I learned, and my shawl is still sitting in the drawer, 3/4 finished :-((

Oh, lord, knitting left-handed using right-handed patterns sounds incredibly difficult. I'm glad you've moved on to bigger and better things. I guess a baby and yarn is almost as good a combination as cats and yarn. Mostly, though, the cats want to lie on whatever I'm knitting. They used to attack the yarn until they found out just how unpopular that move was.

Good luck with getting on with the shawl!

PeggyC said:

I guess a baby and yarn is almost as good a combination as cats and yarn. Mostly, though, the cats want to lie on whatever I'm knitting.

My grandmother used to knit. Her cat ignored all the acrylic yarn and went for the real wool. Grandma had been out running errands and found the yard wrapped in and around every piece of furniture in her back room. It was not salvageable, she had to cut it to unwrap all the legs of the tables, chairs, etc that the cat had batted the wool around.

I think it is the smell of wool that attracts them. Mine will ignore mittens and hats, unless they are made of wool, then they pounce on them and carry them around the house like they were prey.

But when I was knitting my cats never bothered the yarn, except for one or two isolated incidents, and they were easily shooed away.

Yes! Real wool is like catnip to my guys. They must be able to smell it. They all want to get on top of all my wool pieces and then settle down with their eyes closed and their paws kneading like crazy. They feel the same way about alpaca. I think anything that is an animal fiber attracts them.

I'm not a lefty, so I may be all wrong, but it seems to me if you knit continental style, the lefty issue with adjusting patterns goes away. I learned to knit English style as a kid, but learned continental a few years ago, and since then learned "lever knitting" from my knitting idol, Stephanie Pearl McPhee (the "yarn harlot" - check out her blog if you don't know her!). You lefties, if you don't know continental, it seems to me you should learn it. (I can show you, then you just need to practice.) I'm still not a very fast knittier, but I'm adaptable! Right after I resumed knitting (after a 30-or-so-year hiatus) someone told me her teenaged daughter wanted to learn to knit, and her mom tried to teach her, but couldn't because the daughter was a leftie and they just couldn't make it work. After I learned continental, I spoke to the mom - by then the girl had learned to knit, but I felt badly that I hadn't known to direct them to continental.

BTW - if anyone has noticed....my husband is a teacher at CHS and he "hijacked" my MOL user name some time ago....so if my posts don't ring true with anyone who knows "Mr. T" - much as I think it'd be good for him to knit - he doesn't. I may have to create a new user name. Maybe I'll be "Mr. Robo"

Judy

I've known all along that my knitting style is a mutant approach and technically all wrong, but it's the only way I can do it. Someday I need to learn to do it correctly, one way or another.

I believe that continental vs. english refers to which hand you hold the yarn in. But for most knitters, regardless of which hand they hold the yarn in, the stitches start on the left needle and as knitting progresses they go over to the right. I was taught to knit by my paternal grandmother who was also left handed. Most left handed people learn to knit the "normal" way, which makes sense since then most patterns and books will easily make sense to them. For me to try to learn a new stitch from a book I have to mentally reverse the directions given and imagine what the pictures would look like reversed.

When I knit left handed the knitting starts on the right needle, and slowly progress over to the left needle. My maternal grandmother was an accomplished knitter, and she would try to help me knit, and finally gave up saying she had no idea of what I was doing. As Mergele explained above, it is like watching a right handed knitter in the mirror.

Meg Swansen (or possibly her mother, Elizabeth Zimmermann) has a technique called knitting back backward, where you don't flip the knitting at the end of a row, but rather knit back and forth with the same side always facing you. That sounds like something you could do, spontaneous!

I wish. I might sound coordinated because I knit opposite of most people, but the only reason I am able to do that is because it is how I was taught, just as a normal knitter was taught to knit normal. For me, seeing "normal" knitting is confusing and I can't make head or tails of what I am seeing, similar to my grandmother not being able to understand my knitting LOL

Continental vs. English generally equates to picking vs. throwing. That may sound like greek, but it's a question of whether you use your working needle (the one that's reaching into the last row to create a new stitch) to pick up the free yarn, or whether you grab the yarn with your free hand and wrap it around your working needle for each new stitch. This link explains it far better that I can:

http://www.knittingdaily.com/blogs/daily/archive/2009/09/09/how-we-knit-throwing-or-picking.aspx

I learned to throw as a kid, but it was painfully slow. Then I spent part of my undergrad years in Europe and learned to pick and it changed everything. Soooo much faster!

Jude, speaking as a leftie, Continental doesn't change the mirror-image thing. Lefties still work from the needle held in the right hand over to the left one. But it really doesn't change how we work from patterns. If a pattern says you should cast on XX stitches, or K1 YO K1, a leftie will follow those instructions the same way a right-hander would. I think a lot of lefties get hung up on illustrations though...

Spontaneous, congrats on the Small Person!

I have to admit knitting illustrations leave me exactly as they found me. Since they don't move, I find them quite useless most of the time. Video instruction has been a godsend for me, but would probably not help Spontaneous at all. H'mm.

Mergele, I'm going to have to look at that link to figure out picking and throwing. I'd definitely like to increase my speed.

I wish I could be a picker instead of a thrower, but I'm the slowest kind of thrower. I don't think there's a difference in the final product, but it would be great to be faster! Mergele--how long did it take you to retrain yourself?

I am a little concerned about having to re-learn how to maintain good tension if I try picking, but I do want more speed. My tension now is pretty good, so maybe it won't be difficult to get the hang of it again.

zucca - I found that picking just made more sense to me, and came pretty naturally. I also found that it greatly improved my ability to control tension.

My grandmother taught my left-handed aunt to knit by having her sit across from her so that it was like a mirror image.

H'mm. I wonder if Spontaneous could watch videos and look at illustrations in a mirror, too? Would that work???

PeggyC said:

H'mm. I wonder if Spontaneous could watch videos and look at illustrations in a mirror, too? Would that work???

First I'd need to find a way to keep my son from trying to yank the yarn off of the needles. So far this is the best I solution I could come up with.

Hey, it works for me.

And you're right, I'd forgotten your little distraction. That photo is hilarious and adorable at the same time.

Mergele, I really want to finish that shawl you started me on those oh so many years ago. It was a simple pattern, and I was wondering if you could just give me a reminder.

I believe it was a row of YO, knit to center, YO, k1, YO, knit to end, YO. Somehow a stich was added on each row. Second row was all purl. Does this sound familiar, or have I misremembered it? I don't want to touch the shawl until I am sure so I don't mess it up, it is 3/4 done and looks good so far.

Thanks

Somehow - I learned to knit this way - Eastern Uncrossed:



I've been told I knit 'wrong', until a master knitter figured it out.

Spontaneous - I don't remember the specifics of the shawl, but what you're describing sounds like a basic triangle. With those, the increases happen along a center point with each YO adding a stitch. You'll increase 2 stitches in each right side row - one on either side of your center stitch.

If that's not helpful, let me know and we could get together and figure it out.

Joy, how did you manage to learn that way? I'm looking at it and wondering if I should try knitting that way, because I'm SURE the way I do it is wrong.

Peggy -

Las - and the rest of the knitting train group I was in taught me years and years ago.
It confounded my best friend - she'd say 'you knit wrong, backwards, twist stitches...you'll never be able to follow a pattern.'
A mutual best friend, and master knitter - being unemployed for almost 3 years - she had a lot of time to work on her knitting - basically did a a bit of research and found it had a name and that I could do any pattern I wanted with just a few adjustments.

That sounds right, and I remember you did call it something like a basic triangle, or basic shawl, or something like that. I'll take a stab at it and let you know how it goes.

Of course, it isn't my longest sitting project. I once started a scarf, and picked it up/put it down for well over a decade before I finally finished it. And that was before I had my son so I had no excuse back then.

Spontaneous, I had the same experience with the first afghan I crocheted. It took more than a decade of picking it up, putting it down, packing it to make yet another apartment move when I was in college... but I still have it, so the work must have been worth it.

Speaking of crocheting, does anyone want a DVD with all the issues of Interweave Crochet 2010? My husband, who loves to buy knitting and crocheting books for me, accidentally duplicated on this one.

PeggyC,
Did you ever find a taker for the crochet DVD? If I like knitting, do I want to try crocheting? I have to admit, I love me some granny squares, but I'm not sure whether to embark on crochet or not. So far, I've crocheted only borders on knit projects--some more successfully than others.

zucca:

Granny squares are really easy to do. Advantages include being really portable, being a great way to use up small amounts of left over yarn, and being fun to arrange before stitching the squares together. My favorite granny square pattern is to be found in Better Homes and Gardens Treasury of Needlecrafts. The pattern includes instructions for over 30 different types of granny squares (including some that are rectangular).

I started crocheting when I was a very young teenager, and I tried knitting around the same time. For me, crocheting seemed like instant gratification compared with knitting, although apparently my patience has increased as I've aged. I think if you like to knit and are reasonably good at it, you would probably feel the same way about crochet work. And there are a lot of designers writing crochet books now that are incredibly sophisticated and beautiful... it's come a long way over the past decade or two and is much more hip and styling now. There's one fashion designer who recently had a show that was built around the coolest granny squares you could ever imagine, in shades of black, grey, silver, brown... amazingly sophisticated.

I agree with Joan that it's a boon to crochet granny squares because they are so portable, although I've found a lot of knitting projects that can be carried around pretty easily, too. I took one knitting project to India and worked on it during the LOOOONNNNG flights.

I didn't find a taker for that DVD yet, but now I'm not even sure where it is! However, if you are interested, I could probably scare up the spare.

Don't go out of your way, Peggy, because I'm not sure I'm so ambitious about the crochet thing, but I was just curious. If it turns up, I'm sure someone else could make better use of it, though if there are no takers, maybe I'd give it a whirl. I like the idea of the portability of the squares, but unfortunately, my least favorite part of knitting is the stitching together, so in the end I might not be so well-suited to a granny-squares project.