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]

Having put a fair bit of attention into this matter recently, my understanding is that it's a less common style of knitting but has its practitioners. If you're wrapping the yarn around the needle clockwise (looking at the point straight on) then purling through the front loop and knitting through the back will produce very similar stitches to the more common way of doing it. Though they lean in the other direction (can't remember which one's right and which is left) so you'd want to switch your ktogs and ssks from most patterns, like mentioned in an earlier comment here.

If you're wrapping counterclockwise, which is how folks doing the more common kind of knitting are generally taught, you get twisted stitches: looking at the knit side of a stitch it forms a V with the two strands crossing over at the bottom. It's not necessarily a big problem, you can do most stitch patterns fine, but twisted stitches do apparently stretch less which may be a good thing or a bad thing. And if you do flat stockinette with the purls and knits twisted differently, you start getting a funnier wavy sort of fabric. There's probably a lot of little variations here.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, though, I'm hardly an expert. Of course the bottom line is whether your knitting gets the results you personally want!