Continental and English

[aedifica]

I've always been a "drop the working yarn after every stitch" knitter rather than knitting English or Continental. (I taught myself from a book when I was young, and I couldn't make sense of the instructions for how to wrap the yarn around your fingers so I just skipped that part. Though I discovered a few years ago I had also taught myself knitting through the back loop instead of regular knitting, and that was why my decreases always slanted wrong!)

I knit very nicely if I do say so myself, but rather slowly, and I think my speed would improve if I switched to one of the more common styles. So I finished up my last WIP that needed a consistent gauge, and I'm teaching myself Continental right now.

Any comments, suggestions, advice, cries of horror, etc? How do you knit, and what do you like about that style? If you knit Continental yourself (which my instructions say is also called left-handed knitting, "picking," or German knitting) how do you keep tension on the yarn? I'm experimenting with different ways now.

Comments

[james]

There are also videos on youtube which can show you how people do it. What I find is that if I check out several knitting videos by different people, it's easier to figure out what's going on.

I knit Continental and have done for years so I don't remember how I learned. *But* I used to hold the yarn in my left hand completely wrong so that I had almost no tension on the stitch (and so my gauge was much looser). So I tried just wrapping the yarn around one finger of my left hand, but otherwise I kept everything the same (I don't hold my index finger up to keep the yarn tense and move the needle around the yarn strand. My index finger raises and lowers with every stitch and I have to pick up the yarn with it when I switch to a purl stitch and back).

So my advice is - it may be annoying and hard and slow, but I highly recommend learning the most common way of Continental knitting because it really is faster and you get a nice tight stitch. I've tried fixing my grip, but it's just too ingrained and I figure I'm fast enough as it is. (Which is not fast, but not terribly slow either).

[aedifica]

I also like the videos on knittinghelp.com--I'm not sure I'd have thought of checking YouTube for this. Thanks for that idea!