I'm about to start my first sweater, and I'm finding myself really frustrated by the knitting help available out there for people who knit like I do. One problem is that with the lack of resources and the scatteredness of the resources there are, we often have to figure out our own ways of doing things, which means we all end up doing things very differently, so what works for one left-handed knitter might not work for another. Another big problem is the way a lot of right-handed people seem to want to get involved in the discussion. This is particularly annoying when they want to tell us we lefties are doing it wrong. The way I figure, there is no right or wrong. The only thing that matters is the end product. If it came out okay, which is to say the person who made it and the person who is going to wear it are happy with it, then as far as I'm concerned, it is all good. Honestly, I find myself feeling that I understand knitting a lot better than a lot of people who've been doing it longer because a) I have to think a lot more about what I do and can't always just follow the instructions and b) I've had to figure out a lot of things by trial and error, so when I do finally get things right, I understand how they work and why.
So how do I knit? Well, I don't know all the technical terms, but I hold my yarn in my left hand and I throw my yarn with my left hand. As for the direction of my stitches, they move from the right needle to the left needle. I'm not 100% sure, but I think this amounts to knitting English style but mirrored.
Right now, I'm feeling the need to get organized with knitting, to understand it more at a fundamental level. I've set aside a journal, and when I figure stuff out, I write it down. I'm also planning on using some of the cheap yarn I inherited from Andrea to make swatches of different techniques done different ways. You see, after a personal situation recently--I hesitate to call it a tragedy because I'm physically fine, and though it happened to me, it didn't happen to me--I went a little overboard buying yarn. I've decided to wrap myself in my own warmth this winter, which means I'll be using all this yarn to make sweaters. If you know anything about knitting, you know good quality yarn--even at half-price, which is what I paid--isn't cheap. You also know that when I say I bought enough for 10 sweaters for myself, that's a lot of yarn and a lot of money, which means I'll be doing a lot of knitting, and I want to do it right since I'm going to be wearing what I make. I'm not really sure what I'll do with all this knowledge I'll be acquiring, but it seems a shame to keep it to myself, so I'll try to post some of it here. Stay tuned...
