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

[indeliblesasha]

I just stop occasionally and read my knitting, from side to side and bottom to top. It took me *years* to be able to read my knitting, but one day it just clicked. I sat down sometimes and just did like, 20 stitches, and k2, p2, and just watched what I was doing, and stopped a lot to examine how the stitches looked as I went along. It really just took some time, hopefully it will be the same for your mom. ♥

[alexbayleaf]

I used to be confused by what a "knit stitch" and "purl stitch" looked like because I was, I think, reading them from the other side. I think this came from starting out knitting a lot of garter stitch, where the raised ridges are the most visible feature, and they're formed on the side away from where you're knitting. So for a long time I thought of a knit stitch as looking like "_-_" and a purl stitch as looking like "\/", whereas the reverse is how people more usually think of it.

Don't know if this is relevant, but what you said did remind me of my early confusion so I thought I'd mention it.

[19_crows]

I do that too. I'm knitting a gansey and there are two panels that on the wrong side are either K, P, K, P (etc) or P, K, P, K. Not only do I get confused about which sequence goes where, but I've also started it right and found myself switched. Luckily, I've learned to check the right side after each of these and make sure it looks right.

Very frustrating!

[moonbathe_skin]

I always think that the purl stitch looks more like a pearl!

[eruanna]

I do that too sometimes, especially if I am knitting while watching a movie or talking to someone. Learning to read my knitting helped more than anything, and I am still working on getting better at that. :) It does seem to happen less often, the more I knit, so maybe in time our brains and fingers will be more in sync. ;D

Also, you can drop an incorrect stitch and fix it with a crochet hook or handi tool, so you don't have to rip out a whole row (or several). Learning that was a big breakthrough for me. I can't do it on lace or cables (maybe with more experience) but it works well when I mess up on ribbing or something similar.

[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.

[jumpuphigh]

This is one of those things that will just click one day and you will go, "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh." Until then, I think it helps to do large swatches of one stitch or the other. For example, you could do a baby blanket where you have large squares of knit, then large squares of purl.

[inchainz]

I'm horribly lysdexic so when I'm doing ribbing I think of it as "two left, two right" or "left, left; right, right", or whatever type of ribbing I'm knitting. (I'm a picker, so right = K & left = P.) Since I figured this out I've made far less mistakes with ribbing -- especially once I get into a rhythm.

So I guess my tip is to figure out what kind of rhythm works for you & use that.

This, & learning how to read my stitches has done wonders for my completion ratio. :)