That's Continental

To knit with your left hand, thats quite continental.

Sorry, I couldn't really resist that one.

Anyway, I decided after talking with a friend last week that I wanted to start knitting Continental. It occurred to me that when I color work I struggled to maintain tension in my work and I think its because I usually just hold and wrap the yarn in my left hand as a I work.

I am left handed, so when I started really getting into the fiber arts a few years ago I started to crochet. With crochet left handers hold their yarn in their right hand the hook in the left. When I started to knit more often I learned knit English. I like this style but one of my goals for myself it so knit faster and also make my color work more consistent.

After my summer shawl project (that I am super happy with and turned out so lovely) I wanted to pick a simple color work project to work on my continental knitting.

I started with the Japan Cowl to test my continental skills. I've only been doing it for about an hour but as each row goes on my color work looks better and my ability to hold the yarn gets easier.

Everyone has a dirty little secret...

I have a dirty little secret.

While I have been knitting since I was a kid, but lets be real for a second. I have been knitting past garter stitch scarves for the past 5 years, I have never really questioned how I join my ends. I mean when you are continuously knitting with the same yarn, not a color change, but just one continuous color, I have never learned past looping over my old and new yarn and just weaving in the ends later.

The thought came to me while I was knitting my Seafoam Shawl that I never learned another way. All my past projects I have just waited until I got to a edge and changed skeins there or in the case of my first sweater that I am still working on, I was just planning to work the ends in later. Similar to this tutorial.

But it made me think the other day, in the case of the Big Boxy Sweater I am making that it might warp the fabric or be really obvious.  So I just searched for a way to join in ends.

For the rest of my sweater I am going to try the Russian Join. This tutorial was really helpful because I think that will be helpful with the fabric of the sweater. For my Seafoam Shawl I used a spit splice and despite it being a light fingering weight it had blended in pretty well.

Overall when I was searching for different techniques I came across this tutorial which is amazing. It has difference advice from yarn weights to fiber types and what might work best.

So its good to know that I am not wrong, but I always like to have a couple different ways to do anything.