I am an Eastern uncrossed knitter

Who knew?

My aunt taught me to knit when I was 8.  I don't remember it at all.  I thought I had been taught to knit at a yarn store in Madison, Wisconsin when I was quite a bit older than 8.  They taught me to knit "English" or by "throwing" the yarn -- holding the working yarn in my right hand to wrap it around the needle.  A few years later I decided to try what's called Continental style knitting, in which you hold the yarn in the left hand.¹  To my surprise, my hands knew how to do that.  A bit after that, we had a family get-together and I told my aunt and mother that the yarn store staff had taught me to knit but that I had just taught myself to hold the yarn in my left hand.  My aunt exclaimed with some indignation that SHE had taught me to knit when I was 8 and that "OF COURSE" she had taught me to hold the yarn in my left hand.

Okay.  My hands remembered, even if I do not.

Fast forward to this year.  A friend who teaches in a local yarn store shows me how to knit "combination style," which gives me a much more even tension.   In combination knitting, you knit through the back loop, which twists your stitch, and then you purl through the front, wrapping the yarn clockwise around the needle, which put the orientation of the stitch back the other way around.  That it, it untwists the stitch.  And that did give me a very even tension.

So I was knitting the Ribs and Bobbles vest last night.  I had gotten very confused trying to knit the seed stitch in a combination way, with the knits ending up oriented one way on the needle and the purls in another. So I went back to basic continental for that, but for the long stretches of stockinette, I went back to combined to get an even tension.  But...  I seemed to be moving between two different ways of purling.  And once again, my hands knew that different way of purling.  It seemed more natural.  So I did some research: I asked some questions on Ravelry, the knitting social networking site, and I did some Googling, and I discovered that the "different" way of purling, in which you purl through the back loop along with knitting the stitch through the back loop, is called an Eastern European style knitting.²

That makes so much sense.  My aunt Natalie was taught to knit in the community of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn where she grew up.  It also explains why, when I was showing my sister how to knit a sock, all her stitches (stockinette knit in the round) looked twisted.  She was knitting Eastern European style, with no purl row to untwist the stitch.  So I guess I uncovered a little bit of family knitting history.  Which is nice, since I miss my Aunt Nat.

 

^{1. For those of you not familiar with all this, here are some videos and explanations.}

^{2.Now these categories are of course really fluid, with the combined and the Eastern European perhaps the least common in the US.  Especially the Eastern European.   And there is a video by a well-known knit designer, who is Russian, demonstrating what she called the Eastern European style, but she actually does it combined style.}

Comments

[Isobel DeBrujah]

Thank you for the video links. I really need to figure out how to get better tension between my knits and my purls.