Continental vs English Knitting ~ What's the Difference? ~ Which one should I use? Pros and Cons

So in our first knit lingo series we're going to talk about the two ways that most people knit. There is other ways at least one for sure. I'll talk about those later but right now we're just going to stick with the two most common ways and it's basically how you're holding your working yarn which is the yarn that's attached to your ball. You're either holding it in your left hand or your right hand and normally you don't interchange. You might for like Fair Isle Knitting, but for the most part, you pick Pick a hand and you stick with it for the life of your life. So let's talk about the left-hand method first. That's my preferred method. It is called continental knitting. There's also people that call it picking or German knitting. Just kind of depends on where you're at in the world to do that. I find this to be so much faster than the right-handed, which I'll talk about those names in a second. It's very efficient, very efficient for purling because you're just moving the yarn. back and forth over your needle as you're working so one of the pros of this is that it usually is faster than just Throwing your yarn, which we'll talk about in a second, with your right hand. So I really like the left hand. It can cause some hand strain, but I think the right-handed method can as well. It's just a different type because you're doing different motions. So for this one, you're kind of like twisting a lot. So if you have pain when when twisting your wrist, this may not be the best option for you. The right-handed method may be better. So speed, Versatility, it's very easy to switch back and forth from stitches. But possible hand strain so that's the left-handed. Okay so now for the right-handed this is usually called the English method it can also be called throwing or American and what it means is we're gonna do our knit stitch and instead of just kind of bringing our yarn over we're throwing it from our right hand so it's a little bit of a different motion that you can see. I'm bringing my whole hand around some people. I am not very good at this one. Some people have really figured out a speedy way of doing this and they can do it very quickly. So if you check out people that do the American style or the English style on other channels, and you see, you'll see that some of them are very, very fast. Me, I'm just, I fumble along. So with the purling it's a little bit more difficult. You have to bring the yarn to the front first. You can see I'm not very coordinated with this. We're gonna bring that around, then you gotta bring it around again. And then off your needle, your yarn is in the front, so then you have to bring it back. So if you're, if you're doing like basket weaving or a moss stitch, you're doing a lot of this each time. So you can see how that can create a lot of extra effort when the left-handed, you can just kind of pop back and forth and nice and easy. So again, bring it to the front, come around. Go through. Just a lot of extra work. So I'm not a super fan. I am a crocheter so when you crochet you hold it in your non-dominant hand, the working yarn, so it's a lot faster. You're used to having it in your non-dominant hand so the tension can be the same. I use the same tension hold for both knit and crochet so it's a lot quicker for me. Some people think that the tension is more consistent with the throwing method. I think it's all personal. I think it I think it depends on how How you learn to do it and how you perform it. So it's, I should probably stick with the right as I'm talking about it. It's possibly less hand strain because you're not doing these twisting. You're actually coming around and your whole arm's kind of moving and there are people that can just kind of do it with fingers. But if you have hand pain with one, you may want to switch to the other. Give it a try, see if it reduces your hand pain. But those are the two methods. Highly personalized. I will not say which one could be better for you because it's totally how your muscle memory of your hands is going to function its best. So try both, give each one a good college try and see which one you prefer and make that choice but definitely do that before you really get into learning everything else because it will affect all of the stitches that you do. So I'm going to be going over all these kind of basic things that don't always get talked about when you're starting out so that you can really make a good choice when you're learning to knit. So be sure to like subscribe and hit that notification bell so you know when the next Um series video is released. I am Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After and thank you for watching.