A new challenger appears - Knitting and the woes of starting out

 

The old stand-up comedian 'gag' about mother in laws doesn't apply in my case, my mother in law is awesome and the sort of person who has so many strings to her bow that you wonder how she gets time to fit it all in. 

For a while I've wondered whether I could push my luck with my needlecraft skills and move on from Crochet to knitting. Again this is something that my late Nan spent a lot of time doing and one of those 'weird' skills that blokes don't normally pay much attention to, but for me it's something I've always wanted to learn. 

Thanks to my mother in law, I now have a few knitting needles to get me started - and figured that with the awesome help of the internet, I should have a fairly easy job of learning. But compared to crochet, this is a whole new ball game!

For starters, I had problems holding the needles. Two great big slippery metal needles (you know the sort, the ones that your mum or grandmother or great grandmother used to sit there clacking together endlessly while the wrestling was on during "World of Sport" on a Saturday afternoon). I feel that knitting is a bit like learning to ski after mastering snowboarding - you're suddenly moving from one 'tool' to two at once and it took me ages to work out how to actually hold the needles, way before I got to the next challenge. 

Casting on. What? What the heck is that? I didn't have to do that with Crochet? Why do I have to do that with knitting? 

Well, knitting is essentially like weaving in rows and you start by 'casting on' the required number of loops (Stitches) before you actually start the real work of knitting them together, passing them from the left needle (for me left, because I'm right handed) to the right one (the 'business needle'). I read so many different tutorials and watched quite a few YouTube videos featuring all manner of weird and wonderful techniques for casting on before I settled on the ONLY one that made sense, and made it seem simple: 

Well look at that, R J is the MAN when it comes to teaching you to cast on. In fact this tutorial isn't bad for the 'other bits' either, but we'll come to those in a sec. 

Before long I'd ended up with 20 cast-on loops on my left needle. "YES! THIS IS EASY!" I foolishly said to myself. But then came the actual mechanics of knitting and it was around there that I realised that this was a lot harder than I thought. The right needle goes where? What did he just do with the yarn there? What on earth, HOW! HOW DOES MINE NOT LOOK LIKE THAT?

After a lot of swearing, wailing, gnashing of teeth and almost giving up I did end up with my first row of stitches on my right hand needle. They looked awful, the yarn had so many pulled threads in it, I probably dropped a few stitches - and then I realised I had NO BLOODY IDEA AT ALL WHAT TO DO NEXT! RJ let me down as he got really 'sketchy' about how to start the second row. A plea to all YouTube tutors for this type of stuff, step through it slow, let us see your hands and don't assume that we beginners have a clue what you're talking about when you're using technical terms like "back loop, front loop, yarn over" even if we've come from the world of crochet. 

So my quest continues. I've since found a slightly better video: 

...which I'll be having a go at once I've got some free time. 

Thinking back to when I was first learning crochet, I remember having the exact same problems with online tutorials - the same 'sleight of hand' going on when you want clear videos of where the yarn is going or what the person is doing with their hands, and written instructions / photo tutorials aren't much better either. 

BUT after a few months of crocheting I feel like I can almost do anything (Cable stitch is still impossible but I can live without it). So knitting will be mastered, one way or the other - I won't let it beat me!