Learning the Purl

As you may have gathered from the title of this post, in my latest knitting session I learnt a new stitch called the 'Purl'. This is a nifty little stitch, it's quite like the normal stitch in process - as in stick needle through the hole, wrap wool around, flip and flick it off the end - but it's different in the way your piece of wool sits and which new loop you need to catch. In the normal stitch your wool is at the back of your knitting and out to the side, when purling, the wool it at the front of your knitting, in between the gap in your needles. Also in normal knitting you wrap the wool around the back of the back needle - when purling you wrap the wool around the top, behind that first needle.... 

Now the next confusing thing about this stitch is that you only do the purl stitch in one direction. So I'm purling left to right (and my purl stitches end up on my right needle). BUT when you turn your knitting around and start on your next row you go back to normal stitching. So you purl one way then normal back, and the stitch still ends up as a purl stitch. Don't ask me how it works.. it just does :P Now this is a stitch as a beginner I needed to concentrate fully on, as I would finish my row - I sometimes forgot which stitch I had been doing and so was unsure of what to knit next.. HOWEVER I came up with the easy solution - If the knitting was on my left needle.. and I wanted to purl OR knit, i was to just normal knit back... because then if I had planned to purl, it would... and if i had wanted to knit normally it would carry on :)

Now I apologise if I have completely confused you.. Trust me when i say this is not going to be a blog where you can learn how to knit - this is just me rambling on for the sake of it. BUT..here is a great purling online tutorial I found, (My lesson had finished with my teacher for the day - and I had a complete mind blank on what to do but couldn't put it down.. Youtube is always your friend!)

This is how my purling turned out  :D

Now I decided I wanted to do a ribbed cover so I did normal stitch for a while, then when I learnt purl stitch did that for 4 rows then went back to doing normal stitch for 4 :) - I just had to remember to flick my wool to the back of my knitting when going back to the normal stitch.

Now when I had knitted enough to cover the body of my bottle my teacher (at the next lesson) said I should start vertically alternating my stitches to create a new look for the spout of the cover - I was like oh God really? but then rose to the challenge.. turns out it wasn't too difficult. I only had one blunder to begin with - When Vertically alternating you alternate stitches on the same row and then do the same backwards on your next row.. Here is where your maths calculations come in people! So - I had 52 stitches and so decided to make it even and go 13 knit, 13 purl, 13 knit, 13 purl. Easy enough? well. It was at this point I was getting quite confident in my knitting skills - was thinking I was rising above beginner and then I do something stupid to do with maths and muck up my first alternated line.. in stead of the original plan of 13 13 13 13 I did 10 13 13 16.. I must have though at the beginning i was doing even 10's.. See, you do need to concentrate when knitting!! Oh well, lesson learnt,, and it doesn't look too bad...

Anyway as it's the first line of the neck of the spout it will be covered by a ribbon and a bow :D so no worries.