Maybe you’ve been thinking about learning to knit, or teaching your child how to knit for a while. Well, now is a good time! Especially if you have the supplies around the house. Knitting, once you’ve gotten the hang of it, is a very calming activity and a post-apocalyptic life skill. You can create clothing and useful items out of yarn.
Knitting really boils down to making a series of knots with two sticks. I’ve taught a couple of classes in knitting and have seen where beginners get stuck, so I will give some tips. What age is good to learn to knit? It depends on the child and their level of manual dexterity, interest and patience, but I’ve taught 8-12 year olds successfully.
Start with a ball of cheap acrylic yarn and knitting needles in U.S. size 8 or 10. Don’t use novelty yarn, baby yarn or anything that is delicate or hard to handle. If teaching, set up so you are sitting next to your student, not across from them, and have your own set to demonstrate from.
The first lesson is creating a slip knot. This is a knot that is adjustable. Before even taking out the needles, practice creating these until you can do them easily.
Casting on: this is putting the yarn on the needle. We’re going to make a square coaster for this lesson, so put 20 loops onto the needle. (I used 10 loops in my demonstration, but it’s too small for my favorite mug.) The first loop is your slip knot, put the needle through the loop and gently snug it (don’t make it too tight). There are different ways to continue, I cast on by “finger knitting”, creating a loop on my finger and one on the needle, then pulling the one on the needle over itself (see video).
There are two basic stitches for knitting- one is knit, the other is purl. Doing all knitting stitches makes a stretchy fabric, so it’s called a garter stitch. Alternating rows of knit and purl is a stockinette stitch, because it creates a smooth side and a bumpy side.
Knit Stitch: Holding the needle full of yarn in your left hand, poke the other needle in to the stitch from the front, from left to right. Take the yarn and go around the right needle, between where the needles are crossing, and hold it there, while you slide the right needle through the loop underneath, catching a new loop of yarn as you go. The right needle goes from under to over the left. When you finish a row, you switch hands.
There's an old poem for children about this:
Go Through the front door
once around the back
peep through the window
and off jumps Jack!
Binding off: It takes a while to finish a project. I once had someone who took my class come back in a month later to go over how to finish- you can’t just take the needle out and call it a day, you have to close the knots. So how I bind off is knitting two stitches, then pulling one over the other, from right to left (unless you’re left handed!)
Problem new knitters encounter:
- pulling yarn too tight so that it won’t slide or allow needle in
- leaving yarn so loose that there are huge loops
- dropping stitches
- adding loops unintentionally
- getting confused about difference between knit stitch and purl stitch
- forgetting how to finish a piece (bind off)
Of course there’s more to it than that, but I think you should practice these skills until you get confident with them before moving on to things like purl stitch, gauge and cables.
Helpful knitting sites:
- Ravelry- a community of knitters and a database of patterns
- In the Loop Knitting – a great collection of patterns
- All Free Knitting has video tutorials
- Instructables Knitting tutorial
