All this time...

All this time, I thought I knew how to pick up stitches. I mean, I've been picking them up, but unsuccessfully. I knew all along that something didn't look right, but I continued on with my absurd picking up technique anyway. I would look at knitting books and stare at the instructions for picking up stitches and think, that's what I'm doing - why do my projects look so...bad? On a whim, I watched a video on YouTube and finally learned the error of my ways!

All this time, I have been picking up a stitch with my left needle and then knitting it with my right. The result was this twisted-looking line of stitches that pulled very far away from the edge they had been picked up from. What I didn't understand until now is that your left needle is not involved at all in the process: it's just the right needle, the stitch and the working yarn!

The funniest thing is that all this time, I thought I was right! This makes me want to go back and reknit things so that I can pick up the stitches correctly. Well, not really. But from here on out, I will.