First Knits

A learn-to-knit book for someone who has never held knitting needles.

It starts with a slip knot and ends with a ribbed hat that fits. Along the way you make six useful things, and each one teaches one or two new skills on the pages just before the pattern that needs them. Nothing appears in a pattern until the book has shown you how to do it.

What you will make

1. The First Cloth: a garter-stitch dishcloth. Cast on, the knit stitch, bind off, weave in ends.
2. The Striped Headband: an ear warmer in two colors. Long cast-ons, changing color, carrying yarn, sewing a seam.
3. The Hand Warmers: fingerless mitts with a thumb hole. The purl stitch, stockinette, k2, p2 ribbing, mattress stitch.
4. The Pebble Cowl: a chunky loop in seed stitch. Reading your stitches, bulky yarn.
5. The Corner Cloth: a dishcloth knitted from corner to corner. Yarn overs, knit two together, growing and shrinking a piece.
6. The First Hat: a ribbed beanie in two sizes (heads about 20½ to 25 in). Gauge, choosing a size, crown decreases, gathering.

How it teaches

• Every movement in numbered pictures. The knit and purl stitches are each shown in four drawn steps (in, around, through, off), with the yarn you are working in one color and the stitches already made in another, so you can see exactly where the new loop goes. Cast on, bind off, yarn over, knit two together, purl two together, color changes, seams and dropped-stitch rescue are drawn the same way.
• Every pattern written twice: in normal pattern shorthand, and beside it in plain words.
• The stitch count after every row, printed beside the row, so you know at once if something went wrong. All six patterns were checked stitch by stitch: every row uses exactly the stitches on the needle and leaves the count printed.
• "Is it right?" boxes after each new skill: what you should see, and where to go if you do not.
• Circles to tick for every ridge or row, so you never lose your place.

Also inside

• Your kit, how to read a yarn label, needle sizes in US and metric, and one shopping list for all six projects.
• How to hold the needles and yarn, with notes for left-handed knitters and for the yarn-in-left-hand (continental) style.
• Fix it: a finder table from "what you see" to the mend, then pages on extra stitches and holes, dropped stitches and ladders, twisted stitches, tension, tinking back a stitch at a time, and ripping back safely with a lifeline. Includes a spot-the-mistakes exercise with answers.
• Reading patterns: every abbreviation used, the US and UK words for the same things, and how to decode brackets, asterisks, sizes and "ending with a WS row", with a practice line and its answer.

What you download

• First Knits (51 pages, PDF, US Letter, in color, with bookmarks and a contents page).
• Pattern Pages (7 pages, PDF): the seven pattern pages from the book gathered in one file, so you can print them and tick rows on paper.

Good to know

• US knitting terms and US measurements throughout, with metric beside them. UK equivalents are listed in the book.
• You will need straight needles in US 8 (5 mm) and, for the cowl, US 10½ (6.5 mm), plus worsted (weight 4) and bulky (weight 5) yarn. Exact yardages are given for each project.
• This is a PDF download. No physical book, yarn or needles are shipped.