My blogging has been spotty at best the past couple of years, but it’s not for lack of subject matter. I have been knitting and spinning a lot, and I even was dealt quite a surprise by life that I could certainly right reams about. (Nothing earth-shattering, just a rather definitive change of hair texture from almost perfectly straight to pretty wavy/curly, but, oh my, how different curly hair is from straight!)
Considering the dearth of recent blog posts, you may be wondering what has spurred me to write, and a complaint no less. It’s probably not what you guessed. The following post has nothing to do with Donald J. Trump and the evil circus that currently occupies The White House. But if you guessed YouTube, you would be right. The following complaint has to do with YouTube, but not with YouTube in general. I find YouTube to be very useful and entertaining. My beef is with a specific YouTube video I watched earlier today.
My complaint needs some context; I hope I don’t bore you to tears setting things up. Oh, and one more thing before I begin: if you are a Continental knitter in the US (Continental knitters hold the working yarn in their left hand), you may find what follows insulting, offensive, mean, or just plain ignorant. If you wish to avoid feeling all butt-hurt, stop reading now and go watch a Disney movie or something. If you read it anyway and feel insulted, offended, picked on, or hurt, well, I’m pretty sure that means you saw yourself reflected in my complaint.
So, I have been knitting since I was 9 years old. My mother taught me to knit, and she taught me to knit the way that she knitted, which was the way that she was taught to knit, English throwing, in which the working yarn is held in and manipulated by the right hand. In spite of the fact that my mother could knit Argyle socks in her sleep (Ewwww! Intarsia), she was never a very adventurous knitter and didn’t often try to improve or expand her knitting skills. I, on the other hand, always worried that I was doing things wrong, always wondered whether there was a better way than the way I was doing it, and always wanted to add new skills to my knitting knowledge. But not intarsia. Intarsia is evil.
Over the years, I taught myself a number of techniques including a bazillion different ways to cast on and cast off. I also taught myself how to knit in the round on double pointed needles (mittens and socks); how to knit lace (the first time I knitted lace patterns, I didn’t know it was lace, and I didn’t know lace was supposed to be hard); knitting socks on two circular needles; knitting in the round using Magic Loop; and doing stranded color work using two hands (which means I was knitting one of the colors using my left hand, aka Continental). Some of the techniques I kept. Some I abandoned. And I still am searching for that perfect cast off. There’s always something new to try in knitting.
Although I have become proficient at using my left hand Continental style for two-color stranded knitting, I’m still not all that great at knitting Continental–my tension is rubbish–and I find purling Continental style cumbersome and tedious, although I am better at it when I purl combination style which means I wrap the working yarn around the right-hand needle the opposite direction which changes the seating of the stitch which means I then have to knit that stitch through the back loop on the next row. (Sorry for that sentence.)
However, I am not a total fumble-fingers when it comes to left-handed knitting. I have recently been toying with Portuguese knitting, a style of left-handed knitting that originated in the Middle East and spread from there to the Balkans, Greece, and Portugal, and from Portugal to South America. In this type of knitting, the yarn goes from the right hand around the neck to the left hand (or a special type of pin may be attached to the clothing on the knitter’s left shoulder and the yarn goes over the pin instead of the neck) and the stitches are made by flicking the working yarn over the right-hand needle with the left thumb. It is a very efficient way to knit, and the purl stitch is even easier to do than the knit stitch. In Portuguese knitting, garter stitch knitted back and forth is done in purl instead of knit, and when knitting stocking stitch in the round, it is done with the purl side to the outside (inside out) because purling is so efficient in this style of knitting. I have caught on to Portuguese style knitting very quickly, and after only a day of practice, I feel completely comfortable with it. Really, it’s a great technique and very easy to do.
So what the heck do I have to complain about? Well, I’ve been watching videos on Portuguese knitting on YouTube. I have learned a lot of new knitting techniques by watching videos on YouTube, and there are some outstanding Portuguese knitting instructional videos available. YouTube is a treasure trove for knitters. But it is also a rabbit hole, and not all videos are created equal. During my Portuguese knitting video binge, one video led to another and then another, and then I watched a video recorded by a Continental knitter who was trying Portuguese knitting, and not doing very well because she wasn’t doing it correctly. I’m not sure what value she thought would be in a video demonstrating a technique that she admittedly was unable to actually do properly because since she doesn’t tension her yarn when she knits Continental (actually, she does, she just doesn’t recognize it), she wasn’t tensioning the yarn when attempting to do Portuguese knitting. Fortunately, the commenters were not shy to point out that her refusal to tension the yarn with her right hand was the reason the Portuguese knitting wasn’t working for her. I’m not quite sure why a knitter would make and then upload a video to demonstrate a knitting skill that she doesn’t have, but she is a Continental knitter in the US. Just sayin’.
But while that video may have primed me, it’s not the one that set me off. It was the one that followed, in which a Continental knitter in the US was comparing Continental knitting with English knitting. Now, even without watching the video, you know that the knitter is going to be dissing English knitting because that is what Continental knitters in the US do. I was curious to hear (and see) her ignorance of English knitting, because Continental knitters in the US tend to be totally lacking in a knowledge or understanding of English knitting. So I was treated to the usual crap about about how much better and faster Continental knitting is than English knitting and how hard it is to purl in English knitting (because you fucking don’t know how to purl right-handed, you blithering twit), and blah, blah, blah. Seriously, if you are going to post a video on YouTube that is supposed to be a demonstration to compare Continental and English knitting, you for damn sure ought to be able to actually do English knitting.
The way she was knitting English was typical of rank beginners. But it seems to be pretty common for Continental knitters, at least those in the US, to have some serious misconceptions about English knitting. They seem to think that their shitty attempts at English knitting are actually how right-handed throwers knit (no, we don’t drop the yarn between stitches, and even though we do take our right hand off the needle when we throw the yarn, it’s a quick and efficient motion, not a slow, long, drawn-out affair), and they don’t seem to even be aware that flickers (their right hand never leaves the needle) and lever knitters (their right hand never touches the needle unless they are using short needles) exist. I cannot tell you how many YouTube videos I have watched in which a Continental knitter has tried to demonstrate how to do a particular maneuver English style, but they cannot fucking do it right. You know what, just do it Continental. Believe it or not, we English throwers will be able to translate it to right-handed knitting or find a video with a right-handed knitter demonstrating the maneuver. It’s not rocket science, it’s knitting.
And now I will end this post by saying what I really shouldn’t have to say but still have to say it–NOT ALL CONTINENTAL KNITTERS!
All Kinds Of Knitting 