Continental vs. English Knitting. Say What?!?

Well as my knitting journey continues this week, I discovered there are two distinct techniques for knitting! Who knew?!?  When I was learning knitting from Sheep & Stitch I just assumed there was only one way to knit but I have now discovered that I learned what is called “English Knitting”. The other one is called “Continental Knitting”. While trying to learn more about the differences between the two techniques, I came across this article by Handy Little Me that was full of interesting information.

Continental vs. English Knitting

Continental

• Also called “German Knitting” or “European Knitting”. As you may have already guessed from those names, this is a common knitting technique in various parts of Europe
• Left hand holds the yarn and controls the tension
• Sometimes referred to as “pickers” due to the motion of the right needle picking the yarn and wrapping around the yarn that is being tensioned with the left hand
• Beneficial for people who struggle with arthritis, since smaller movements mean less strain on the hands, wrists and fingers
• Has the potential to be a faster knit, which is good if doing large projects and wanting to speed things up

English

• Also known as “American Knitting”
• Right hand holds the yarn and controls the tension
• Sometimes referred to as “throwers” since the right hand “throws” the yarn around the right needle
• This style is often taught to beginners since the movements are easier to grasp when first learning how to knit. I found this true in my own learning experience.

I will admit that in my attempts to learn Continental Knitting I wasn’t very successful. I found it to be a hard technique to learn, even after watching multiple videos from different sources. I gave it a fair shot and I am okay with not being able to do Continental Knitting in the end. I heard that once you have learned a particular style, it can be hard to switch to the other style. I feel that since I have learned English Knitting I prefer to just remain with that technique for now and focus on improving my skills from there. Also, there is no substantial benefit for Continental opposed to English Knitting, it is more a personal preference.  In saying that, I do plan to give it another shot further down the line once I am more confident overall in my knitting ability.

 My Learning Experience  

Overall, I really enjoyed learning from the source Handy Little Me. I imagine it is going to be another one of my ‘go to’ resources. I was exploring the website and found so many blogs I want to read that I think will be beneficial in my journey! This article I found, nicely lays out the basics that a beginner knitter should know, including a list of basic supplies. I even found a section that explains how if doing knit stitches only it technically makes a “Garter Stitch”. I had documented about this in one of my previous blogs since this is a piece of information that was left out of many sources I originally learned from and hadn’t known until I stumbled upon this realization myself later on. Another beneficial feature is Handy Little Me is connected to various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, X and TikTok which makes it easy to find valuable content of hers. Also, she has many different free knitting patterns to download, ranging from easy to hard, which I am excited to try in the future! The only problem I had with this source, is some of the blogs were extremely long and had an overwhelming amount of much information to digest. The other thing was there were quite a few ads that kept breaking up the information and this interrupted the nice flow of the webpage. However, those were both minor things and barely even noteworthy. I would highly recommend checking out Handy Little Me to anyone who is knitting, no matter where they are in their journey!