"You're doing it wrong!" - More simple things I wish I'd known about knitting vs crochet

 

Sometimes it's the simplest advice that can have a massive effect on your needlework. For me, with crochet it was learning that there was a massive difference between US and UK terms, and also a huge difference between the 'right' and 'wrong' side of your work. 

To die hard experienced crochet folk, it's second nature but when you're learning it just takes a single paragraph in a blog post to make a huge difference if you're struggling to get anything worked out or made. 

So it is with knitting. There's a phrase in my "400 Knitting patterns" book that I just couldn't really understand, or (like a typical bloke) hadn't 'read the manual for'. 

That phrase is "Work each stitch in the manner which it is presented".  To a novice you might think that this is simple enough to interpret but I completely got it wrong. Used to working alternative rows in knit / purl for standard stocking stitch, I could not for the life of me work out why most of my patterns looked entirely unlike the ones in the book. 

The worst case was anything ribbed. I dutifully would knit 2, purl 2 then when it came to flipping the work, I would make the whomping great big mistake of purling 2 and knitting 2. Sometimes you DO need to do that but then I found a blog post that made me realise where I'd been going wrong. 

It's all to do with the stitch count. Normally I try to keep my work fairly symmetrical, and that means an even number of stitches across the board. Usually 20. 

So for an EVEN number of stitches, you do NOT purl the knit rows, knit the purl rows. What that phrase "Work each stitch in the manner which it is presented" means for EVEN numbers of stitches is that you knit the knit stitches and purl the purl stitches. Essentially if you had a pattern that looked like this on Row 1: 

Row 1: K1 (Edge), *K2, P2* (*Repeat to last stitch then K1 (Edge)

for your EVEN number of stitches you would need a Row 2 that was identical to the above. 

Row 2: K1 (Edge), *K2, P2* (*Repeat to last stitch then K1 (Edge)

For an ODD number of stitches you would instead do: 

Row 2: P1 (Edge), *P2, K2* (*Repeat to last stitch then P1 Edge)

The best way to see this in action is the good ol' 10 stitch swatch. So try both methods with 10 stitches and you'll see the huge difference between something that looks almost like a knackered Moss stitch, to something like the more ordered ribbed rows shown in the image in this article. 

The image is also useful for telling the difference between when to knit and when to purl as it shows exactly how stitches look as you're knitting them, 'right side' or 'wrong side' of your work. 

One further point worth making is that knitting 'in the round' on those lovely round needles doesn't require much in the way of this type of brain-mashing rethinking, as you literally knit your socks off continually without flipping your work, so don't have to worry too much about the mental gymnastics of working right side then wrong side / calculating whether you're working odd or even etc. 

Hope this is as helpful to you if you're a knitting novice as it was to me when I discovered it. All credit to Simple Knitting for pointing me in the right direction!