Greener

I've spent a fair amount of time marvelling at the Yarn Harlot's way of knitting, which she calls "Irish Cottage knitting", though the rest of the world seems to know it as "lever action knitting" or, more picturesquely, "armpit knitting" (or "crotch knitting"). It's a variant on English knitting that keeps the right needle stationary, and though I don't fully understand how it's worked, that's probably because no one has ever been able to slow down an armpit knitter enough to see what they're doing.



She's fast. Really fast. But then I stopped to consider how fast I knit, in terms of stitches per minute, and I found that I wasn't that much slower. If I'm concentrating, I can whip them off the needle at about that speed. (Stopping to scoot the stitches along the needle every ten stitches or so is what slows me up.)

So why does my knitting look so slow and hers look so fast? I think it's because she uses such big motions to work the stitches. It's counter-intuitive- you'd think that to go faster, you'd want to minimize motion. So I thought about this a little bit.

The Harlot and I knit at about the same speed, stitch per stitch. The difference is that she can keep it up for a long, long time, whereas I get tired easily. It turns out that it's the little motions- like the small motions I use when knitting Continental- that cause repetitive stress injuries. By knitting with those large, sweeping motions, her hands are getting less tired.

So now I'm weighing the costs and benefits of switching knitting techniques again. I know that I'm running up against the grass-is-greener principle here, but really, what can it hurt? If I try it and don't like it, I can switch back. All I have to lose is a few hours of feeling clumsy and uncomfortable at something I'm pretty good at. It's just a matter of steeling myself to survive those hours, which sounds silly, but feeling like a total beginner again is rather stressful. The question is, is it more stressful than having to lay off knitting and ice my arm for the days after Christmas?