Teaching yourself to knit can be daunting. Trying to decide what someone else’s fingers in a book diagram are doing with the yarn on the right needle, or what ‘PSSO’ stands for can make you feel as if you are learning British Sign Language or Japanese.
But it doesn’t have to be like that…
When I first tried to knit I was in primary school and my garter stitch grew gradually at both sides from where I had mistakenly picked up stitches. This is a common error and happens when you don’t make sure the yarn leading from the ball is at the right hand side of the left needle when you begin a new row. It’s just the type of error you make when you don’t have someone more experienced to show you. After taking it up seriously 18 months ago I managed to practice my way out of this mistake. It took patience and a lot of determination.
My advice to novice knitters
At first knitting gave me no pleasure. I had made another beginner’s mistake – buying cheap acrylic nasty yarn to practice on. My advice to any new knitters is buy the absolute best yarn you can afford. There is a huge range of price options. The more expensive yarn I eventually bought was a delight to knit with and helped me enormously.- Make use of the many online knitting sites that offer guidance and advice. Sites such as knittinghelp.com offer videos from a birds’ eye view – which is 100 times better than working out the aforementioned book diagrams.
- Don’t be put off by confident advanced knitters – you will get there in your own sweet time.
- Don’t be scared by the thought of knitting a jumper – practice with straight projects such as blanket squares – you will knit a jumper when you are ready and not before.
- Another tip is to read knitting blogs – not just mine (see link below), but also the professional bloggers who sell their own original designs. This gives you a standard to aim for.
- Join an online knitting community such as Ravelry which is an excellent international knitting site where you can find your local knitting group and even see what other members are knitting. You can also find knitting groups on Facebook and you may even discover that your existing friends are secret knitters!
- Another good tip is to get craft books from the library. I very rarely buy a knitting book but photocopy the patterns I want instead. As long as you don’t distribute these or sell them as your own patterns it’s fine. You may not be able to find the very latest books but it will still save a lot of money.
Most knitting magazines on sale in newsagents are, in my view, a waste of money. While this may be due to taste and the fact that I’m possibly considered younger than the average knitter at the age of 29, I find that a lot of the patterns aren’t up to the same standard as those in books. One exception to this is Woman’s Weekly which has a nice pattern every week at 82p. Instead of paying £3.50 or £4 for a monthly magazine from which you half-heartedly knit one pattern, you could join Rowan International for half the cost and get a beautiful magazine twice a year and much more besides. You will also have access to their website which is full of free patterns for you to download. The newsletters you receive throughout the year are another excellent source of advice and support.- Get a knitting bag – I was all over the place with my needles and projects when I first started – it doesn’t have to be expensive – just somewhere you can always find your yarn!
Happy knitting!
To find our more about Angela and links to her favourite sites vistit her blog
>>http://sewingisforgirls.blogspot.com/
For more knitting inspiration
Posted by mary mayfield (unregistered) on November 13, 2009 at 12:05am
If you're only knitting blanket squares or something requiring only small amounts of each colour, look in the clearance bins at your wool shop - they're generally stocked with end of dye-lots for sale at possibly half price. I do a lot of fair-isle and intarsia knitting and have picked up a lot of oddments this way. Sometimes it's possible to find larger amounts of yarn on sale offers, generally when a shade is being discontinued. both are good ways to get better yarns cheaper.