Backwards is the New Forwards!

While glancing through yesterday's Knitting Daily blog post on bobbles (truly just glancing; I despise bobbles), I was startled to read that somewhere in the midst of Eunny Jang's bobble tutorial video, there were instructions for knitting backwards.  Not tinking (i.e. unknitting), but actually knitting (or in my case, purling) from left to right.  This effectively means that you don't have to turn the work to do the wrong side rows.

Well, I couldn't be convinced to watch a tutorial on bobbles just to see this miracle, but I figured it couldn't be that hard to figure out.  It's just the logical reversal of what I already do.  And here's what happened:

It was exactly like learning to french braid my own hair.  By the time I was eight or nine, I was a whiz at three-strand plaits - my fingers flew through them.  By eleven or so I had mastered the slightly more complicated technique of french braiding - but only on my friends' heads.  One summer, while staying at my grammom's place at the shore, I decided that I was going to french braid my own hair, with no help from anyone. 

It was unbelievably awkward.  My elbows and wrists twisted around behind me, not being able to see what I was doing... I was taking a set of motions that had become muscle memory, and forcing myself to do them inside-out.  Ever try to tie your shoes a different way than you're used to?  The results were a mess - it was severely lopsided and there were bits sticking up and out all over.  In its own beachy, summery way, I suppose it could have been passed it off as cutely mussed.  In fact, I probably did just that.  But it took years of practice before my hands felt really comfortable with the motions, and my braids started to look as neat and straight as when my mom did them.  Now I do it all the time, sometimes to work, sometimes to just casually and quickly pull my hair back.

Thankfully, thinking through what exactly I'd need to do to purl a stitch on the wrong side - from the right side - and then getting my fingers to do it without dropping the needles, only took about ten minutes and a dozen stitches.  But despite the difference in scale, the process felt exactly the same.  For a few minutes, knitting managed to feel alien to me all over again.

It was pretty fun.

And let me tell you how not having to turn my work every eight stitches on this entrelac scarf is a HUGE time saver!