I help out at a retirement home and I like to talk to these ladies, they are in their late 80s. They knit a lot.
Anyway as I was talking to them I asked them to show me how to knit. Well I am terrible with my hands, and I practiced for a week and couldn’t even get more than two lines without looking like garbage.
What irks me is these two ladies make beautiful things, and they ain’t even paying attention to what they’re doing. Well that’s how it looks anyway
They’re talking to me, looking out the window, talking gossip about how everyone else dresses.
They also crochet which I couldn’t even tie one knot that way.
Obviously these ladies have had years of practice. How long does it take to get to that point?
My friend Leslie knits while watching television, and she’s been knitting for about three years. But she’s a bit of a prodigy. I’ve been knitting about six months and I definitely have to watch what I’m doing.
I took a class with her, about knitting with speed and efficiency and she showed us how to speed up our knitting, as well as practicing other ways of knitting. She told us to keep practicing and that it takes about 28 days, give or take, before it sinks into muscle memory and becomes easy (or easier).
Interesting class all in all.
ETA: I’ve been knitting about three years this time (retaught myself). I watch tv, but only when doing mindless knitting. I can knit lace while watching tv, but only when it’s a show/movie I’ve seen before and I use it as background noise.
Knitting and purling is pretty mindless. When you’re following a pattern, it takes a bit more concentration. Were these ladies doing straight garter or stockingette stitches?
I can do straightforward (knit/purl combinations) without looking and many non-straightforward while looking only sometimes.
I’ve been knitting for over a quarter-century. I know how I knit, how knitting should work, how the yarn feels, where I can probably get by with not paying attention, and most importantly, where I need to pay attention.
Do something big and semi-mindless. Simple sweater, giant afghan type of thing. You’ll begin to get used to the feel of your own knitting over swaths of basic patterns.
I am a much better crocheter than knitter, but I can only knit without looking–it’s much easier to do by feel alone than crochet. I’ve been crocheting for, I dunno, over a decade and knitting for a bit under a year.
Most of the knitting I’ve done recently has been French knitting on looms, rakes and bobbins of various sizes - this is even more repetitive than knitting on needles, because there’s no end of row to necessitate a stop and turn.
It only takes an hour or two of practice to be able to do it by feel (but still be thinking about it), then after another hour or two (not necessarily continuous, mind), the thought processes managing the knitting sort of get allocated their own processor thread and although there’s still thinking going on, it doesn’t overlap or interfere with the main occupation of my thoughts - which may be conversation, music, TV, etc.
The world would be a much better place if everyone knit!
Secondly, do not compare your learning skills to old ladies who have been knitting possibly for decades. It isn’t fair to you at all.
Thirdly, your first project will not be perfect. Accept that. It is a learning process and right now just learning to knit all the stitches and not drop any or add any is hard enough.
When you have mastered the two stitches in knitting, knit and purl, you can then decide what level of challenge to you want to try* if you wish to*. There is no competition. It should be (overly) stressful.
I don’t know what they were making, one of them made me a hat.
I don’t think I could ever knit like this, but I thought I could at least get more than one row and have it be straight.
I could never take up anything like knitting or crocheting, I don’t have the ability or patience for stuff like that.
I just have never been good with making things with my hands and it is irksome that these ladies can make such beautiful things while not paying attention to what they are doing. Well, as I said, it SEEMS, they aren’t paying attention.
The two ladies have to be over 85 so I’m assuming they’ve done this for decades.
I’ve saved the first thing I’ve ever knitted, as a morale booster for beginning friends. It’s a knitted doll in garter stitch that I made when eight or nine, in a terrible colour combination and with bad technique (loose stitches where the stuffing peeks through, badly sewn together, starting and finishing rows far too tight, unplanned increases and holes where stitches had slipped or I’d looped the yarn around the needles by mistake.)
I’d say the first challenge for a new knitter is to get the knitting gauge right and uniform. Lots of pros recommend knitting a scarf in some fluffy yarn and garter stitch, just for practice (fluffy because the unevenness doesn’t show up as much, garter stitch because it won’t curl up like stockinette does, and a scarf because it’s dead easy and less work than a sweater.) Don’t look too close on the recommended needles, make a small test swatch first and see if it fits the suggested # of rows and stitches per inch or centimeter. If it’s too big with large spaces, and you keep dropping needles and stitches, you need smaller needles, and if you can hardly get the stitches to move, you’ll need bigger ones.
And just to cheer you up, the first two or three rows on a new project look half-baked for me as well. If you can hold out for an inch, it may start to come together.
I’ve been knitting about three years, and it’s about two years since I had to look at my knitting a lot. If it’s a new, complicated lace pattern I’ll still need to pay attention. Otherwise not so much.
The key for me was learning to read my knitting and fix my mistakes. Once I knew what was going on on the needles it was a lot easier to get my hands to remember the tricky parts. Reading my knitting is useful for making sure I stay on track in lace or cable patterns or when I’m in a shaping part of a pattern.
Once all of that clicked, it became much easier to knit without using a large amount of brain on it.
Anyway, this was about my fourth attempt to learn to knit, and the first couple of months were FRUSTRATING. And now I’m the knitting fixit lady at work, so if I can go from complete fumbling moron to the one who gets everyone’s work handed to her with a “I don’t know what I did, but please fix it!” then I’m sure you can move along with practice from the irritating beginner stage you’re in to something closer to what those old ladies are managing.
I’ve been knitting for twenty-two years. Wow, I’m old. No, wait, it’s just that my bubbe taught me when I was eight. Anyway, yes, I can knit very quickly and no, I don’t need to pay a lot of attention to what I’m doing. I can chat or watch TV or do whatever while I’m knitting. I rarely drop a stitch and my edges are nice and even.
It took me about six years to get to this point, I would estimate. Don’t worry that you can’t do it after a week or two!
OTOH, I find patterns entirely baffling, so I rarely make anything more complex than hats. (I experiment with different styles of hats, though!) I’m on my winter break at the moment and bought a knitting How To book the other day with the goal of getting past this block I have, and now I’m working on cabling. And this does require my attention. (Okay, I still watch TV while I’m doing it.)
If I understand Idlewild, it’s the ability to look at your knitting and know what’s going on there. Which row is this in the pattern (if you’re a pattern follower), whether or not there’s a dropped stitch, or an extra stitch, whether everything is ok.
Basically being able to tell where I am and what’s going on on the needles just by looking at it. Is the next stitch on the needle a knit stitch or a purl stitch? Is it mounted so that when I knit it the stitch will sit straight or twisted? If I’m looking to see if I increased or decreased already, can I identify the stitch where that happened? If I’m working a lace pattern, I need to be able to count across a row and figure out by the configuration of various stitches what row I’m on, and if I made a mistake, where it is.
Some of that’s advanced but some of it is basic and will help with not dropping stitches or accidentally making stitches because you can see what you’ve done. One way that a lot of beginners accidentally make stitches, for example, is that the first stitch in the row kind of gets flipped over and you see two legs of the stitch below on the needle and knit both of those instead of just one of the stitch you’re supposed to knit. Another accidental increase that makes a hole is if you are moving between knits and purls, you may leave the working yarn in the wrong place and inadvertently make a yarnover. Being able to see that is helpful!
I’ve been knitting for just over three years and I’ve been able to “mindlessly” knit simple things for about 2 years. I usually need a few pattern repeats to establish a pattern in my head before I don’t have to look at it as I work. For lace or cables or more complex patterns, I need to focus on my hands, but I can have the tv on or carry on a conversation without trouble.
I think, like others have said, that it’s all about muscle memory. I took a break of a few months from knitting earlier this year and it came back to me very quickly once I started again – kind of like riding a bike.
It took me about a month before I could knit say, 4 rows of 30 stitches each and have each row have 30 stitches. I taught myself to knit on mohair is why :rolleyes: . Learn from that and pick a simple plain wool or cotton yarn in a solid color so you can see the stitches.
That’s something, too. Don’t expect to make a perfect (or even adequate, really) piece of knitting your first (or second, or third, or fourth) time. The basics are easy, but the little things that make a knit piece look GOOD come gradually, and with repetition.
I learned to knit with Red Heart, which is akin to Kevlar, so that I could clearly see all of my stitches and mistakes. In addition to making it easy to read my knitting, the yarn was practically indestructible, so I used to spend quite a bit of time practicing, then ripping back the mistake-ridden piece and reknitting it into something marginally better.
No morale-boosting first swatch for this knitter. I’m weird that way. Destroying the evidence of my past mistakes was both cathartic and fun, like bubble wrap.
As a data point for you, I learned to knit when I was ten-ish, started knitting in earnest in the middle of high school, and after about five years of that I can knit in stockinette, ribbing, or seed stitch somewhat unconsciously, to the point where stopping requires more mental effort.
FWIW, if you get some cheap yarn and just practice, just knit a 90 foot scarf, unravel it, and knit it again, just to fill the time while watching TV or something, eventually it will become permanent muscle memory, and you’ll be able to do it in your sleep. At that point you won’t NEED any patience; knitting PRODUCES patience as a side product; it’s like meditating. But you have to make that 180 foot scarf to get to that stage.