I really mean that - it doesn't just seem like that because I stop once I get to a right way. I bet I would make a great user-testing subject for Ikea instructions.
I've never seen a name put to this talent, so I made up my own.
This talent also applies to my attempts at crafts. I crocheted wrong for months before I figured out how to do it right. It wasn't wrong enough to fail to produce a fabric, but it wasn't an ordinary single-crochet fabric. It was a "single-crochet into the back loop" stitch, as I later found out.
So a couple of days ago I was waiting in an ice-cream shop for my sweetie
kyubi and I was reading a book that kightp recommended, Barbara Walker's Learn to Knit Afghan Book. I was reading the basics about how to start knitting because I've never been happy with how I hold the yarn.And I discovered, and subsequently confirmed by looking at how-to-knit instructions in my other knitting books, that through all the hundreds of yards of fabric I've knit so far, I've been knitting backwards.
Explanation for those who are geeky enough to care: All the books say that once you have loops of yarn on your left needle, you begin to knit by putting the right needle through the yarn from the front left to the back right of the loop. But I was putting the needle through from the back right to the back left.
They also say that you loop the yarn around the needle from left to right. I was looping from right to left.
The fabric produced by this is almost identical to correct knitting; there is a small difference in how the loops lie against each other. And this is, I've learned, an actual stitch. I think it's called "knitting through the back of the stitch." It's just not the standard knit stitch.
The benefit from figuring all this out is that doing it the correct way makes it a bit easier to handle the yarn so the knitting goes slightly faster. I'm now knitting almost as fast as I crochet.
