First knitting post from beginner knitter
First knitting post from beginner knitter
Hi! I just learnt how to knit a couple months ago, when I started to attend a meetup group with my mom. I learned to crochet in school, but I always failed to learn knitting, maybe because I'm left handed?. But something clicked now that I'm an adult and I'm hooked. I'm mostly taking on smaller projects like hats and mittens, these are the first I made to give away to a friend for her little girl (3yo) but they ended up being too small lol.
Used free patterns found online, the mittens were done with crochet. I don't know what else to put in here 😅 So feel free to ask if I'm missing some important info here, please.
Edit: Thank you everyone for your kind words, I look forward to keep sharing my projects in such an encouraging and lovely community 💕
Those look great! Your cables especially are very neat. I think I spent like my first 6 months knitting twisting my stitches until some kind soul straightened me out.
Ugh. Is that kind soul still in this world? I keep having to google the matter and squint at it for prolonged periods, and something about the difference has never quite clicked with me. The terminology, maybe. "This leg has to go on this side," and all my brain does is verify that there are indeed two legs and a hole in the middle. Good job, Brain! 👍
I sure hope they are still around! I think it was a member on craftster.org, which is no longer, sadly.
At the risk of looking like an actual lunatic, please allow me to share my preferred way to visualize the “legs” of a correctly-seated and twisted knit stitch: https://i.imgur.com/qSpPd18.png
Not sure if that will make any difference for you, but the visual is always entertaining to me.
Which style are you knitting? Because I think it's pretty easy to tell in Continental without the need of having visuals. Should apply to throwing as well, but not sure about that so I'll limit it here.
Untwisted stitches tend to open up for your needles. When you're inserting the needle from left front to right back for knitting, that should be possible without any difficulties, as the legs act like a doorframe facing this exact direction. When the stitches are twisted though, you would work against your stitches, fighting your way through in a kind of slalom motion.
I don't know why, but the colors on that pompom make the whole thing unusually cute.
You haven't missed anything. I seem to always see each side saying the other is more difficult (it's crochet, crochet is more difficult), but they really just both require sufficient stubbornness. I've mainly stuck with toys/amigurumi, and I'm only just in the very baby stages of branching into anything wearable myself, so here's hoping for minimal frustration. Or at least for mistakes horrible enough to be funny.
I feel like one is left brain and one is right brain 🤣 obligatory I'm a knitter, but I tried crochet recently and how the hell do you even know where you are? Like knitting you can count and it's super concrete and crochet just feels like a confusing free for all lmao.
(And I know if I put more time into it maybe I'd catch on and knitting probably felt the same when I started blaahblah)
Oh, for sure, I was in tears my first crochet project because I had no idea what a stitch even looked like in order to tell where the needle was supposed to go, and the guy in the tutorial kept covering it with his hands as he worked. It was awful.
With knitting, it's just..always on the needle. With crochet, you have to be able to tell different things apart from two different angles and for a beginner, the whole thing's bull.
There are multiple ways to move onto the next round, with different favorites for ease of use or a prettier look, but the most-used imo seems to be the one where everything is made in an upwards spiraling fashion, making physical stitch counts worthless until you've finished a row you may not remember the beginning of.
For these reasons, markers are god. Far more so than my experience with knitting. Losing my place on this row or not being able to see some important point on the previous just leaves me frogging back til the count matches some definite point, and that could be an hour of lost work.
Fortunately, I wanted to make a little buddy triceratops more than I wanted to admit anything beat me ever. (Really, there are just very few good knitting patterns for toys, so I had no other option)
I find crochet requires a lot more of my mental focus than knitting. I can follow a conversation or watch a tv show while knitting, but not so much when I crochet and I have to count stitches and what not. Markers were a godsend.
Not worth posting, my bum! These look great! I love the colour combo too where you've picked out that dark blue from the variegated and run with it, really makes it feel like a designed set and not just a "well I had this one ball of yarn..." thing. And cables! I know experienced knitters who shy away from cables! Also congrats on being bistitchual now! I'm using too many exclamation marks because it's early in the morning and I'm excited, just roll with it.
Since we're apparently sharing our own newb tales in this thread too, here's mine:
I learned from illustrations in a blog post and must have misinterpreted them massively because I spent the first month knitting everything through the back loop. Turns out if you do that consistently everything sort of looks right, so I never noticed until eventually watching a video and realising she did it different and then looking up why that might be. No wonder I hated purling so much though! 😂
Thank you! I wanted to do the whole thing in the variegated yarn, but my mom (an avid knitter since she was 6yo) advised me that when the stitch is more 'complex' it looks best done in a solid color, so I got another skein, and I love teal, so there's that.
I didn't know there were different styles of knitting until I started watching youtube tutorials. Some made sense with what I have learned from my mom (that I now know is called continental) but others looked soooo weird.
Aha! Yes mom definitely knows what she's talking about 😄 The more complex the stitch pattern the more solid the colourway is definitely a good rule to live by, although in fairness a lot of people love to use variegated for everything even if the stitch pattern does ultimately get a bit lost.
It's one of those personal preference things you'll end up just experimenting with here and there. I was so afraid of making the "wrong" yarn choice I stuck to entirely solids for probably a year haha, don't be like me, it's not that big a deal.
I also agree with your mom. It’s really disappointing to spend a lot of time on a complex pattern and have your neat stitching drowned out by the variegation.
One pattern I do really like for variegated yarn is linen stitch. It’s only slightly more complicated than stockinette, but I find that the slipped stitches actually help to enhance the variegation instead of fighting with it. Instead of color streaks you get something closer to confetti or cookie sprinkles.
Looks great, keep it up!
