south paw stylin'

Saturday I ventured to a cool little yarn/ fiber store over the river. The boy and I have recently started house hunting, so of course you have to check out the important things...proximity to yarn, distance from nuclear reactors...you know, the basics.

So while I wandering the aisles fondling the yarnbounty, I struck up a conversation with the lady who was working at the shop. She had what I'm guessing was a 60% German accent, and I just loved listening to her talk.

We struck up a conversation about how she has been working in various knitting shops for nearly 20 years. After a bit of discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of double pointed needles versus circs for sock knitting she asked me to explain my knitting style.

This is when things got a little complicated.

Ummm...well...first off, I'm left handed. And lets just say that to this point, its all been self taught from various books and such, without the benefit of having someone around who actually knows how to knit, let alone knew how to knit left handed. I muttered and stumbled, and gave the backstory on how I started knitting.

I took up knitting when The boy and I were living in the mountains of North Carolina and I wanted, no... I needed something to keep my hands occupied on winter nights. When I saw needles in the Wal mart they called to me, so I took them home. I've only recently progressed to the point of actually making things that have a defined stitch pattern, so I started to question if I am doing it correctly.

Mind you, at this point I thought that we were just making conversation. What I didn't expect was to find myself being handed a circular needle and some wool ordered with a short German tinged "Show me!"

So, with more performance anxiety than I would have had facing a ninth grade algebra exam ( if it were timed, and I needed to finish it underwater upside down in a shark tank) I took the needle and showed her what passes for my normal stitch.

I'm still not even sure what happened. But I can say that I felt like the most interesting exhibit at the zoo. She was circling me to get a better view, and muttering " wow! that's so interesting." and "this could be really helpful in certain styles of right-handed knitting" and "I've never seen anything like this before" .

That I am doing something in a style she hasn't seen before seems pretty spectacular considering her length of time around knitters, but I'm really not sure what it means in the grand scheme of things.

I may not know what to call it, but this is what I do:

I knit from my right needle to my left needle. I hold my working yarn in my right hand, but I pinch it between my pointer and middle finger for tension, and I pick it with the left needle to make a stitch. I wrap counter clockwise from the bottom and I knit into the front of the stitch. I purl into the back of the stitches.

If I'm knitting with straight needles, I generally plunk one of my needles into my belly button to brace it and go to town (this horrifies my mother, due to a deep and inexplicable navel phobia).

Anybody have a name for this kind of south paw stylin?