Laddering

I hate knitting in the round.  Well, I love it, because it's easy, but when I'm on double pointed needles (DPNs), I just can't seem to make things work the way they need to.  If I knit one style, it's fine, but slow as dirt.  If I knit the faster way, I keep running into complications with this thing called laddering.  I just can't seem to win.

Here's the deal.  Laddering is the term for those funky loose stitches where the breaks for each needle were when you're knitting.  Effectively, the stitches between the needles were loose, but all the other stitches are tight enough.  If all the stitches were that loose, it wouldn't be a problem, but they're not, so it creates a funky spot, and it looks horrible.  The goal is to avoid this "laddering" effect.

Way back when I used to knit in the way known as English style, I had no problems with laddering.  I couldn't imagine what people were talking about or why it was a problem.  I just cruised through everything without a concern and that was that.  I was knitting in the round like crazy.  I preferred it to flat knitting.  It was the way I was convinced I would do everything from that point on.

Unfortunately, I had a brilliant plan to learn a new style of knitting.  When I learned to crochet, I determined that I would learn "continental" style of knitting.  It seemed to make so much more sense, after all, you hold the yarn the same.  Most of my knitting friends have talked about how much faster continental style knitting was.  They were right.  I was cruising through projects.  I didn't realize it at the time, but my knitting became looser.  It wasn't until I started knitting socks again that I noticed the effect.  No matter what I did, I always ended up with laddering.

It took months for me to realize what had changed.  I used to knit so flawlessly in the round.  I never had problems like these before.  Then I went to Boston and suddenly I had all these laddering problems all over the place.  I didn't know where they'd come from.  I just couldn't knit in the round anymore!  My work looked horrible and I had to try all these little tricks to be sure I minimized the problems as much as possible.

Of course, I didn't notice this then, but now it's pretty obvious.  When my knitting style changed, so did the end result.  Socks had more problems with laddering, as did hats and everything else.  It took me nearly a year to figure it out, and an experiment with reverting back to English style knitting.

Well, I guess that solves that.  I'm back to English knitting for certain projects until I can figure out how to knit continental style without causing all sorts of laddering effects.  At least I know what the problem is now and I can work towards fixing it.  I suppose some progress is better than none at all.