I favor right-handed knitting, which makes sense because my right hand is my dominant hand. And I knit right-handed continental, because I learned how to crochet first. (I only remember teaching myself to crochet days before I taught myself to knit, but I recently discovered that I’d been shown how to do it as a very small child.) Ah, the joys of muscle memory.
However, I’m not completely right-side dominant. My right eye is the dominant eye, but I’m left-foot and left-ear dominant. So it’s probably not surprising that, despite my right-handedness, I can train my left hand to do certain tasks.
Months ago, I learned how to knit back, because I was sick of turning and purling. (It’s not that I think it’s hard, it’s that it’s slower.) And it worked beautifully. After that success, I figured, “why not learn to knit entirely left-handed?”
So I did.
I make a distinction between knitting/purling back and actually knitting left-handed, because the stitches get oriented differently. When I knit or purl back, the leading leg is in the front and on the right, trailing leg is in the back and to the left – because that’s how the knit stitches are oriented when I do right-handed continental.
However, when I knit true lefty, I knit combined. I think. I say this based on how I wrap the yarn and how the stitches are oriented. But I haven’t been able to find a lot of information on it, so I don’t know if the hand you hold your yarn in matters. (I hold the yarn in my left hand; I tried left-handed continental once and that was a miserable failure.) I’m not quite sure why I knit lefty combined instead of English, but hey, whatever works, right?
At some point, I’m going to try knitting an entire project left-handed, though that may require a bit of mental gymnastics on my part. It should be a fun exercise…
All posts