the purl stitch

While I was working with my boyfriends grandma last week trying to figure out how to cast on and continue, she recommended a few things to me to try after I was comfortable with the knit stitch. The next thing she said I should try is the purl stitch (I definitely typed “pearl” in the first time when looking for it, LOL). I found a website that has a video as well as photos to look at with explanations to help me learn the purl stitch. If all of these fail – I will probably make my way back to my boyfriends grandmas house and ask for assistance – or at least to check my work.

My plan was to finish the green block of my knitting before I started learning something new with it. So here is my full green block all completed (it is not perfect but it is a start!!):

Here is also a photo of my cat, Katniss, being very involved with my knitting one night. She loves to play with the strings of yarn hanging down as well as biting and attacking the needles:

Now I am getting to the part of the yarn where I am changing colours from green to purple. My goal for this week is to work on the purl stitch with the purple section of my yarn.

Through my research, the purl stitch is essentially the opposite of the knit stitch – meaning instead of going behind the needle with the yarn on it, you go in front. This seemed easy, but it was indeed not. Check out my time lapse video of my progress today.

As you can see in the video – I began by just adding on to my knit stitch section. Then as I was almost done the first row of the purl stitch, something was going wrong. I could barely move the yarn up the needle. I could not finish. I decided that it is okay and I ripped all of my purl stitches off. I ran and got scissors and cut off my green section from the rest of the yarn. I was going to start over.

I went back to my first video to go back to the casting off stage. I remembered that I did it differently with my boyfriends grandma, so I went back to YouTube to find a video to show me the way that we had done it together. Luckily I found a great video that walked me through it and I remembered almost immediately how to do it!

My goal for the rest of the week is to continue to practice my pearl stitch. After I finish a good section (or hopefully all of the purple section, I will learn how to go back and forth between the two!!

In the end, I might just have a bunch of random sections of yarn that are just me trying different things, and that is okay 🙂 I am finding it difficult to learn new things with knitting online because there is no one to tell me if I am doing it right – for example when I was starting out, my boyfriends grandma immediately told me to restart because something was off. If you don’t have someone beside you that knows what they’re doing and can help you problem solve along the way, I find it hard to have confidence to keep going!!