These wrist warmers are knit in the round until you get to the thumb. You go back and forth until the thumb is finished and then go back to knitting in the round. As you can see on the left, I was having issues with the thumb section and I couldn’t figure out why.
A little back story: When I do ribbing in the round, I knit continental and purl combination. I don’t know why. It just seems easier to me. When I’m going around and around, it doesn’t matter. What I failed to remember is that when I go back and forth, my stitches are twisted. Doh!
So, both wrist warmers were finished, but in the back of my mind they were bugging me. I don’t remember exactly when I realized my mistake. It was probably in the shower. Isn’t that where all of our a-ha moments occur? Last night I ripped back to the beginning of the thumb and paid closer attention to the orientation of my stitches. The fixed one is on the right.
Now that I’ve figured it out, I feel kind of dumb.
“When I do ribbing in the round, I knit continental and purl combination …… Last night I ripped back to the beginning of the thumb and paid closer attention to the orientation of my stitches”
Is this English? It’s like I know the words…but you are putting them together in some combination that is completely foreign to me.
By the way….I don’t like to brag about my creative skills, but I can totally sew a button onto a shirt. Let me know if this is something that I can help you with sometime…. ;)
I think it’s got to do with my being an engineer, but I learn much better visually. When I started knitting and learned how to fix mistakes (dropped stitches in particular), I noticed that each stitch hangs onto the needle a certain direction, and if you don’t pay attention to that, you get twisted stitches. So, I’ve always been very particular about how I make my stitches.
Most of my old Chicago knitting group never paid attention to this–your particular problem has happened to lots of people! A friend had a project involving lace that she was knitting and her stitches were not sitting right, twisting in the wrong places, so the pattern just looked wrong. So, we went through the differences of knitting and purling the front and back loops. Once she worked a few rows and saw how much of a difference that simple fact can make on a pattern, her knitting really took off!