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I taught myself to knit as a teenager. I was a “thrower” - right hand/American. Very, very slow. I am good at following directions, picking up stitches from watching videos and I have actually knitted a lace scarf for a present with some mohair yarn I got from an aunt, but it was laborious & it took months!!

Two years ago, I decided to switch to Continental. It never worked for me - I was used to seeing the stitches using the right hand feeding the yarn. Purling Continental is awkward & I never did it long enough to get comfortable with it. At that point, I gave up on knitting projects - I’d made a baby hat for a cousin & it was “ok”, but again, long process.

Knitting continued to “haunt” me. It’s not as chunky as crochet, which I like, & there were some projects I really wanted to make. I was looking at videos on how to hold yarn in my right hand & came across a video on “flicking”. You do not let go of the needle when you flick, unlike throwing. I “practiced” on a pair of arm warmers (see post 76) for a friend and as I knitted, my speed started picking up! Within the week, I am guessing my speed has at least doubled - probably tripled. The gal in the video has been flicking for 20 years so I have a few years to go to get up to her speed. Let’s just say that I’m speedy enough now, after only maybe 2 weeks of flicking, that doing projects in a reasonable amount of time is feasible.

Another “biggy” for me - learning to do Magic loop. I looked at several videos and finally found one that explained it to me in a way that was very clear & I could grasp the process. I now use magic loop all the time (rather than double pointed needles, although I have done 2 baby hats with DPNs). I converted the arm warmer pattern from ‘flat’ & seaming to working it in the round using magic loop - no seaming.

So, here are the video links that have been most helpful to me:

Knitting Help - Flicking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y547Q5Hjcuo

Knitting Help - Flicking Q & A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmEGLLbbRB4

Knitting in the Round on Magic Loop - Basic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KccLlkTKzE

BTW, I use a 29” cable all the time for magic loop - she uses a much longer cable in the video (47”). I’m doing fairly small projects (40 stitches for arm warmers) - if I had more stitches that filled up more room on the cables, I’d have to use longer cables.

I hope this helps - I’m actually rather excited about knitting again. I am obsessed with fingerless mittens - working now on some knit ones with bhooked’s pattern (post 78 has link), but there are others I’m anxious to try.

One more thing for when you do start making projects - using a “lifeline”. Probably the main thing I do not like about knitting, as opposed to crochet, is that if you make a mistake, you have all those stitches on your needle to deal with. In crochet, you can just frog back a stitch at a time & not lose a whole bunch of them. When I was knitting that lace scarf, I realized I had made a mistake about 3 rows back. Boy, was that awful. At the time, I did not know about a lifeline, so I didn’t have one to rip back to a place where I knew the pattern/stitch count was accurate. I ended up laying the scarf out on the bed and oh-so-carefully ripped back to where I needed to be and PRAYED I would not drop any stitches .... I also broke out in a cold sweat doing it - seriously!! Fortunately, I got all my stitches back and was super careful after that - counting stitches every row. Now, I use lifelines all the time.