From Sarah E. White,
Your Guide to Knitting.
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If you're new to knitting or could use a refresher on the basic skills, this page collects some of the best articles, tips and tutorials from the site to help you learn to knit quickly and easily.

Learn to Knit

There are several basic skills involved in learning to knit, such as:

• making a slip knot and casting on
• forming the knit stitch
• forming the purl stitch
• binding off, sometimes also refered to as casting off

You'll also need a few basic knitting tools to get started.

Picking a Pattern

Once you've got the basics down, it's time to pick your first project. It's a good idea to start with something small and flat or that doesn't require a lot of shaping.

Many patterns, even those for beginners, seem to be written in code. Here are some tips on reading a pattern and common knitting abbreviations. If you need more help deciphering a pattern, check out the knitting glossary.

Finishing Projects

Once you've reached the end of your knitting, all is not quite finished. Depending on the project, you will need to do one or several of the following before your work is done:

• weaving in ends
• blocking knitting for projects that need to be a particular shape or size
• sewing up seams

Learning New Skills

Once you're comfortable with the basics and have successfully finished a project or two, there are many more skills to try. Here are a few that are well-suited to beginners:

• making I-cord
• knitting stripes
• knitting with circular needles

Troubleshooting

We all have problems with our knitting from time to time, but most of them are easily fixable. The worst thing that can ever happen when you do something wrong is that you have to tear the work out and start over, but some mistakes, like a dropped stitch, can be fixed in less dramatic ways.

• fixing knitting mistakes
• dealing with holes in your knitting
• fixing a dropped stitch