Best advice you'll ever get

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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 haven't knitted for awhile and don't remember where you left. For example, suppose you're in the middle of a row and must stop knitting for some reason. When you return to your knitting, pause before restarting and notice there are two ways to continue. Which one is the correct? Notice that the working yarn is always attached to the last knitted stitch, which is on the needle you should hold on your right hand. So the first stitch on the other needle will be the next one you want to knit (or purl).

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