Knitting dyslexia?

[untonuggan]

I keep having the following situation happen to me. I'll be happily knitting along, say on a 2x2 rib. In my mind I'm thinking, "Knit two, purl two, knit two..." Then at some point I think I've messed up. My mind says I should be knitting, but I'm purling!

Except I'm not. I've just gotten befuddled somehow. My hands know what to do, and hopefully my brain will figure it out before I pull back perfectly good stitching.

My mom seems to have this problem as well, although perhaps more seriously. She just started knitting recently after having been the only woman in her nuclear family who didn't knit. (She crochets, though.) She grew up thinking that knitting was purling and purling was knitting, and so she's been having a hard time "reading her knitting" to tell where she is in a pattern. I generally try to tell her to look where the loop is, but that doesn't seem to stick in her memory.

Do other people have this problem? Any potential solutions?

Comments

[evilawyer]

This may be really off the wall, but I grew up thinking of purl as "punto riso" --- literally "rice stitch." Thinking back I have to say that it helped me a great deal in terms of being able to keep track of knitting versus purling because of the visual appearance of the purl. It looks like dried rice, so I always looked for the bump that looks like dried rice when I was trying to figure out where I was in my work.