Welcome to New Knitters, All Knitters, Male Knitters, and BTW, Try The Portuguese Knitting Style
September 19, 2009 | 
Author Hello! My aim with this blog is to share useful tips and discoveries I make as I learn more and more about knitting. I’m a guy, so I urge guys to knit and everyone to nudge the men they know to learn to knit.
May I recommend you browse for articles in the SITE MAP tab above. It’s the easiest way to get the most out of this site.
And if you like what you see, remember to SIGN UP for updates in the box in the right column. You will get an email when I post a new article.
Especially for anyone who thinks knitting is hard, please try the Portuguese knitting method. It’s easy to master and fast. When I get going I can do a stitch a second. I have a few posts here about it under Techniques, but no basic instructions, so check out the youtube videos.
Again, Portuguese style knitting is VERY easy to learn. It’s easy to control the yarn, and purling is so easy it’s a sin. I also knit Continental style and Eastern European Knitting style depending on my mood or need, but I always switch to Portuguese style for runs of purl stitches.
You work with the yarn either around the back of your neck, or over a pin near your left shoulder, or with the knitting pendant I developed that helps a lot to correct tension issues and protect your clothes from pin holes. Check out the article on the knitting pendant.
It’s called Portuguese style in the USA but it is known across the Mediterranean. I’ve heard the style is used in parts of Italy, Greece, Albania and Turkey as well as many parts of central and South America such as Peru and Brasil where it was brought by the Portuguese. If you know where else it is used and what the style is called there, please comment this post!
Take a look at the links in the Information list on the right, further down the page. There are some great videos on youtube, and there are DVDs available as well, including one devoted to socks, both by Andrea Wong. The DVDs go into greater specifics for various situations you may run into.
Here’s a video to give you a quick intro to Portuguese style:
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Tags: 3 Responses to “Welcome to New Knitters, All Knitters, Male Knitters, and BTW, Try The Portuguese Knitting Style”
Hi Eric,
I just stumbled across your blog this morning, and posted you on my blog!
Hope it brings you a few extra clicks.
Terrye
Knitting Editor
http://knitting.craftgossip.com
Hi,
I found out recently Bulgarians also knit this way. There is a picture of 19th century Bulgarian ladies with yarn not around their neck but with yarn pins on the left at flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/surimi/3401422796/
Excellent photo! Thank you. Yes, it seems that it is done this way clear across the Mediterranean. Probably should have been called Mediterranean knitting, but Andrea Wong didn’t know how wide spread it was before she put out her DVDs that gave it the common name in the US of Portuguese Knitting, as she is from Brazil (which was a Portuguese colony).