How to Read Your Knitting

If you’re new to knitting — or even not that new — and you’re looking for an easy way to improve your knitting skills, you should take some time to learn how to read your knitting if you haven’t already.

Understanding how different stitches look and why they look the way they do makes it easier to catch mistakes and to know how to fix them.

Little Nutmeg Productions has a great post on how to read your knitting complete with lots of photos you can compare to your own knitting. This will not only help you tell your knits from your purls but will also help you see where you increased or decreased stitches (helpful when you need to work a certain number of rows between shaping rows and you don’t know how many you’ve worked).

[Photo: Little Nutmeg Productions.]

Next Pattern:

I’ve been enjoying knit amigurumi animal patterns lately (see also: this adorable knit pigeon) and of course being a knitter I love llamas.

So when I saw this little llama pattern I knew I had to share it.

The appropriately named Llama patter from Annie Ahn calls for fingering weight yarn, and it uses two colors for the body and three for the little blanket. The pompom can be made to match or in another color. All of these parts take tiny amounts of yarn so you can use whatever scraps you have left over from socks or other projects and change colors whenever you need to.

It might also be fun to use some mohair or other fuzzy or textured yarn on this one to give your llama a different look. In all the project uses between 100 and 150 yards, or 91-137 m, of yarn and the llama comes out about 10 cm/4 inches tall.

The body of the llama is worked in one piece, so this project is suited to intermediate knitters or those who have comfort working in the round and with all those little pieces.

This one is made to be small so you can carry it around with you (it would be super cute on a keychain or as a zipper pull) but I think it would be a lot of fun to knit this in larger yarn, too, to make a bigger llama. You could even make a whole family in different sizes just by using different weights of yarn and corresponding needles.

The details are so cute, from the shaggy hair to its little accessories, but you could make it plain or change it up by knitting a tiny scarf or even working a little fair isle pattern on the legs or body. So many fun possibilities!

The pattern is available on Ravelry in English and Korean.

[Photo: Annie Ahn]

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