"You're doing it wrong" part 3 - "Mystery Solved!"

 

I crowed too soon in my last blog post, and in fact thanks to my awesome knitting tutor, I now know exactly where I've been going wrong with my knitting and purling, and the answer will probably come as no surprise to seasoned knitters, as I bet a lot of folk make this same mistake. 

So here's my knitting after being 'corrected' a second time. We got to the bottom of the problem which partially comes from the weird way I knit (a sort of cack-handed 'continental' style) but largely comes from the way I wrap my yarn around the needle when I'm completing a stitch. 

So on the knit side I'd dutifully been using the needle left to right, going through the front of the stitch as instructed. But then the misake. I was wrapping the needle CLOCKWISE around my right hand needle before completing the stitch, not ANTI CLOCKWISE. 

You know what, just having one video tutorial on YouTube point that out to me would've made a colossal difference!

On the purl side I was also doing the same, though this time I was somehow still managing to wrap the yarn the wrong way. 

Once you've started down a particular knitting style though, you get stuck in your ways so it took me quite a while for my muscle memory to adjust itself before I came up with the knitting in the two screenshots here. Nice ordered rows, nice chubby purl stitches, neat work. 

To think I've knitted an entire hat the 'wrong' way, with those weird twisted stitches. As a bit of a perfectionist I'm now tempted to knit the whole durned thing again the right way. 

Thanks to Saffron for her brilliant help! Yeah so what, we should've been working but it's far more fun talking about knitting than enterprise computing, right?