Oolong knits

The best advice I'll give knitting beginners is: look at your knitting. As you go along learning how to knit, pay attention to your stitches and learn how they look. Soon you'll be able to recognize purl from  knit stitches, which is essential once you start tackling more complex projects and need to know where you are and what is the next step. You'll also learn to recognize mistakes and then start to understand how to avoid and fix them. Beginners not only make frequent mistakes, they also seem to be very imaginative at personalizing their mistakes. This is why you'll find very little information on how to avoid and fix the mistakes you're doing. Most probably you'll need to learn to identify, avoid and fix them yourself. If you know a more experienced knitter, then asking for help and advice will help you immensely, but you can do it on your own too. Recognizing your stitches will help you solve many problems. The main one is how to restart when you have...

Now you've learned to purl and knit, to cast-on and off and the basic stitches: garter, rib, and seed, you're ready to go. If you haven't, go back to my previous post. Your first project should be something simple that serves the main purpose of practising. This doesn't mean you won't be able to wear the end product, you probably will. Here are a few thoughts and recommendations. Choose the right yarn. First and foremost choose a simple and easy to knit-with yarn, no fancy mohair, bouclés, thin-and-thick yarns, you'll regret it. Remember you're practising, you'll have plenty of opportunity to use your dream yarn once you've got the hang of it. Choose the right yarn colour. It's better to use a light colour. Very dark colours make it very difficult to see the stitches and you'll need to see what you're doing because you'll need to learn to distinguish the look of stitches and learn to identify mistakes so you can fix them.  Cho...

I learned the basics of knitting on knittinghelp.com . I've checked a lot of other resources but in the end this is the one I used and recommend. I'm very grateful to the respective authors for providing such well done videos for free. There are paid lessons out there that aren't nearly as good. I think their videos have the clearest and easiest to understand instructions. Despite this, I can confess that I had to pause and repeat each sequence about 15 times before I got it right. My first advice to anyone trying to knit is to PERSEVERE. If you're not willing to be very patient and stubborn, give up right now, you'll NEVER succeed. I'm quite aware this is not your usual PC advice, but I'm being nice by telling you the truth. The good news is that after spending the first hours feeling like I had bottles instead of fingers while trying over and over again to repeat the same hand movement with the same pathetic result, I finally got it. I admit the expe...

As with most hobbies, you'll need to buy a few supplies before starting. And, as with most hobbies, you can easily spend a fortune before you even start. My advice is too buy as little as possible to begin with, because there is a real possibility that you'll not like to knit in the end. For every enthusiastic knitter out there, ready to state that "knitting has changed my life", there is another non-knitter who after trying decided knitting is the most excruciating boring activity he or she ever attempted. I know what I'm talking about because I'm both. The first time I tried to knit, I was young and impatient, and I just couldn't sit still for long enough. Now I'm older and wiser, and I've surprised myself considerably by discovering I have enough patience to not only learn it but actually finishing off a few easy projects even if it takes weeks to do it. It's so boring it's still hard for me to believe that I actually enjoy it. Crazy...