Inconsistency between knit and purl orientation. (Continental)

#1

Hello all, and welcome to my first post! Yay. I am fairly new to knitting, and have learned pretty much entirely from videos on this site and elsewhere. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to find much concerning this issue elsewhere on the forums, so here it is:

Recently when inspecting some ribbing, I noticed a consistency issue between my knit and purl stitches. The knits have a cute little twist in them. The purls are “normal” and un-twisted. I much prefer the look of the twist, though I’m not sure if there is any reason I shouldn’t knit this way. Basically, I throw the yarn clockwise around the needle before pulling it through.

Anyway, I was wondering if 1) there is any foreseeable problem with knitting this way, and 2) whether there is a simple way to make my purls have that little twist as well, to match. (I also wonder if that would help tighten them up, since they are looser than knits for me.) Until this is figured out, any projects involving purling are put on hold. Which leaves me very bored and twiddly. [I]You wouldn’t like me when I’m twiddly.[/I] :\ Pretty please, HALPS.

#2

You could be wrapping the purls ‘backwards’ and knitting through the front legs of the knit sts which creates the twist. While you may like the look of it, twisted sts can be tight and it can be really difficult to get gauge on a pattern where that matters.

You should be wrapping both the purls and the knits the same direction. When you say you wrap the knits ‘clockwise’, is that looking down at your needle, or as if you were looking from the tip? For a knit stitch the yarn is in back, it goes under the tip, then over it to the back again. For a purl stitch knit english style, the needle enters from the back of the stitch, the yarn is in front but is wrapped over the needle to the back, then down and to the front again. Continental knitters might also purl that way too, but there seems to be quite a lot of variety in how they do it.

#3

I combined knit, but I was using the Continental purling stitch and it was definitely making my stockinette look horrible. It’s very, very easy to find a way that suits your method of holding the needles to wrap or grab your yarn, but twists (or in your case doesn’t twist) the yarn in a way that is unattractive for your project.

When I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my purling and knitting problems I found that doing small swatches and carefully watching how I was bringing the thread around the needle was priceless in letting me know how I wanted to do things from here on out (and whether or not I wanted to teach myself continental knitting).

#4

Well, it does appear that I am going to have to suck it up and re-learn my knit stitch. At least this was caught early on, before I got to any more/larger projects. Thanky for the feedback. :slight_smile: