Continental, American or Both?

[debbiecakes]

Just out of curiousity, how does everyone knit?

I am continental knitting a super bulky queen-king sized blanket.
I am American knitting two different sport scarves.

For me:
Continental Style = loose, relaxed and quick.
American Style = Tight, tense and slooooow.

The super bulky blanket looks great but when I tried the sport weighted scarves, they ended up looking sloppy so I started over with the American style. Just a quick comparison, I casted on 12 when I started with continental but when I switched to American I had to cast on 26.

I've been knitting off and on for years but I still consider myself to be a novice. Fingers-crossed, with more practice my continental will shape up so I can ditch the American style. Over all I prefer continental because of speed, ease to switch from knitting/purling, and it feels more comfortable in my hands. :)

Comments

[nu_ophiuchi]

Oooo, are you wrapping the yarn around the needle clockwise when you purl? Does your stockinette come out with the stitches' "legs" crossed, or are you avoiding that? I'm very interested in talking shop on this because I just recently discovered I was knitting weird in this way, and I'm still working to settle into a style that feels reasonably comfortable and doesn't complicate patterns or stitch patterns too much.

-- So if that's not what you're doing, I want to know your trick to purling anyway! :D

[afuna]

Try searching for "combination style knitting"! It sounds very much like what you're doing, and there are several very useful resources for that :)

(the main trick, if you want avoid your legs crossing in stockinette, is to knit through the back loop of the knit stitch when you come to it -- it may make more sense if you can find a tutorial with illustrations!)

[nu_ophiuchi]

Oh yes indeed, I probably should have clarified my own part more. I've tried that out and I definitely like it, but it's not without its complications either. I ran up against a project that involved k1b, which I love, and realized I have no clue how to do that through the back loop and no faith that it would be easy anyway. Which also inspired me to evaluate my options more thoroughly in general, as it seems every method is going to make some things harder and others easier.

I'm still relatively new to knitting, and I'm not particularly fast by any method, so it's not much skin off my back to play around with different styles, fortunately. It would be fun to just knit in different ways depending on the needs of the project, but alas I suspect that conflicting muscle memories would eventually catch up with me.

[afuna]

Aaah gotcha! I read your initial comment as that you were already purling in combination style, and just didn't know it!

And yeah, it does seem that there are tradeoffs with every technique. And sometimes the same technique makes, say, back and forth easy, but circular knitting a bit more fiddly. (Or SSK easy, but k2tog fiddlier, etc...)

[franzi1981]

I've been trying to explain, but I can't!

I'm not wrapping the yarn, no. And my stockinette looks like any other stockinette - no weirdness there..

Oooh! Found a video:

http://www.knittinghelp.com/video/play/the-purl-stitch-combination-continental