How to Hold Knitting Yarn

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Christine Pachini for Expert Village and today I'm going to teach you some basic knitting techniques. So the first way of holding the yarn which is the way that I have always knit, is to take the yarn going to the ball, rest it over the last two fingers, the pinky finger and the fourth finger. Then turn the hand over and the working yarn going to the needle is then held here. Now you're holding on here to the tension as you like it against the right handed needle and using this forefinger to do the wrapping action. Then you tuck the needle under, wrap with this forefinger, and then holding the working yarn here, you have the proper tension to pull the stitch through and off the needle. So wrap around with this forefinger, under and over. One of the reasons I like this technique is that you're not holding on too tightly, tightly enough for tension but not too tight that you can't take up this yarn as you keep knitting without too much strain. The second thing I like about this technique is that because all of the wrapping is done with the forefinger, it's really efficient. You can knit really quickly because all of the motion is contained right up here at the top. You're not doing a lot of hand work. You don't have to constantly be dropping the yarn and picking it back up again like so. So that's my favorite method."