Lessons Learned As a New Knitter

by Debbie · Published July 19, 2016 · Updated June 24, 2018

I finally did it! I got past the oh, that looks so cool but so intimidating feelings about learning to knit and just started. What finally got me to get going learning to knit is this crazy thing called scheduling, which I would have never thought to try before. Doesn’t everyone just wait to be in the mood to learn something new?

I installed one of those to do list apps that organized people use and the wheels started turning, I could use this to crack open Stitch ‘n Bitch for 15 or 20 minutes a day and actually move this out of my Pinterest feed and into my collection of hobbies. And ta da! Who knew checking things off a list could be so satisfying?

So it’s been a couple of weeks now of learning to knit. It’s so frustrating! There’s no muscle memory yet at all. I look and feel like a total dork pushing these two sticks together.

Here’s what I’ve been learning as a knitting noob:

Tools you learned for learning anything can be applied to learning to knit: Skim ahead chapters, read the image captions and side boxes, recap and review, watch a ton of YouTube videos first. It’s like a course in school. Actually wish it was!

I like continental knitting, where you hold the working yarn in your left hand, better. After years of crocheting, holding the yarn off to the right and throwing it over seemed too awkward.

I like metal needles better than bamboo. They seem to slide better but really I just want to hear the click!

If you don’t take the loop off just right you will end up with double loops. Stitch ‘n Bitch, the quintessential learn to knit book, describes this but it looked like a foreign language to me until I did it 5,000 times and wondered what was going on.

It’s so easy to knit the tail … 10 times in a row.

Crochet hooks come in handy for knitting. They are useful to pick up a dropped stitch. This was maybe the most exciting thing I have learned, crochet to the rescue!

It’s ok to be a hot mess. I sooooo want to rip out loose stitches, but figuring out how to frog sounds like a nightmare right now. Maybe it is just as much a pain as frogging Tunisian crochet. I don’t know, maybe not! I don’t want to figure it out now. There are only so many things my brain can process at once. It’s fine to do 20 practice rows of knit stitch a day that look like crap. Everything in its time.

I need to learn to “read” the stitches. No matter how many times I think I know when to knit or when to purl, I end up doing the opposite. Trying out to do seed stitch, where you knit the purl stitches and purl the knit stitches, I just end up with funky, uneven ribbing. This progress in this picture took me two days!

And my stockinette stitch doesn’t look like stockinette at all because I am not reading the stitches right. Now I keep chanting in my mind, “When you see a V, knit! When you see a bump, purl!”