New knitter with an headach

2 months ago i decided to take up knitting and fell in love with it. i am using a book to learn how to knit and i started to branch out and go online for patterns. i am making a cocoon for a baby and all i can do is cast on my 70 sts and then knit the first 69. after that it tells me to turn rem st unworked. i dont like to give up and i looked everywhere online in order to find get help. please please someone help me. i am really a visual learner but instructions in lay-mens terms will help me too

Hi and welcome! Work 69 of the 70sts and then put the needle with the 69sts into your left hand and work back on those same 69sts. Leave the one stitch on the needle which will now be in your right hand. You’ll get back to it later. This is called working short rows and you can find videos for it here or on the Internat or perhaps, there are instructions in your book. If you have a link to the pattern or can give the URL for it or even the name of the pattern, it’s a great help to everyone reading your post. A few lines from the pattern help too (but not the whole pattern, please).

When you get to the last st on the L needle, turn as if you were at the end of the row. You’ll probably do the same thing on the next row and the row after. These are called short rows and there’s a video for it on the Tips page, I think.

I learned decades ago from some knitting pamplets and one lesson from a friend’s mother.

Whenever I’d come across a direction that I didn’t seem to understand or couldn’t envision, I just blindly plowed on and followed them step by step. Then I’d look to see what I’d done.

Sometimes you just have to blindly follow…

Yeah, I taught myself. I spent hours trying out patterns with string and when something new didn’t work out, I redid it until it looked like I thought it was supposed to.

This is splendid advice. It’s also the way I learned to knit. I like to understand where a pattern is going but sometimes you just can’t see it. Take the directions step by step and most times you wind up with an “Aha, so that’s how it works!” moment.