Continental vs. That Throwing Thing

I am rather partial to continental knitting. That's the way I learned it from my granny all those years ago and promptly forgot until Summer 2009, when I suddenly got the notion into my head, that knitting might be cool.
Since my granny was not immediately available (she lives about 80km away), I bought a heap of knitting books the height of K2 and immediately got knitting. It didn't take me long to get the hang of it, being rather clever with my hands, and I soon advanced from a simple bag for my mobile to my first ever sock!

And that's where my addiction truly started. Naturally, like most addicted people, I couldn't get enough, and I proceeded to enhance my repository of techniques and patterns and books. So I shopped at amazon and I googled my fingers off. And that's where I first came into contact with the other kind of knitting: That Throwing Thing, or the English Method.

At first, I had trouble identifying what style I am knitting myself in , but a couple of minutes on youtube soon cleared it up. And I also got a better look at the throwing style. But I can honestly say, that I still do not understand how so many people (most of GB and the USA) could persist in using a technique that is so slow, prone to very loose tension, and so unneccessarily complicated as That Throwing Thing. Yes, you've read correctly: complicated!

The question Continental vs. English has been discussed before. At length. And one of the most featured arguments was and continues to be, that the English method is much simpler, easier to learn and therefore much better suited to beginners. I disagree. Strongly. Essentially, the knit stitch is a knit stitch. Whether you knit it in Continental or English, it always looks the same. To understand how such a stitch works, is totally independent from the knitting style. Whether you grasp the concept of how the stitches all hang together is more a matter of your intellect and dexterity and not whether you throw something or not.

In my opinion, That Throwing Thing is slow and messy, because to knit a stitch you have to:

Insert the tip of the right needle into the next stitch, change the working needle from one hand to the other, while taking care that the tip of the needle does not slip out of the stitch, find (and untangle) the working yarn, wrap it around the needle tip and push (or shove) the tip out of the stitch. After that, you have to tug the yarn a bit with your right hand to get some tension, change the working needle back to the right hand, only to almost instantly change it back to the other hand again. And so on...

The English style of knitting makes you spend most of the time playing musical chairs with the needles and organizing the yarn with too much movements and chaos and far too high a potential of losing needles, stitches and yarn.

Compare it with the Continental knit stitch:

Starting a row, you grab the needle with all the stitches to be worked on in your left hand, wrap the working yarn around your left index finger and take the other needle in your right hand. While knitting, you never let go of either needle or working yarn, so you only have to do this procedure once every row, after which you can keep the yarn wrapped around your finger and only have to change the needles.
The actual knit is produced by inserting the tip of the right needle into the next stitch and catching the working yarn with a quick twist of the right hand. After you caught the working yarn with the right needle, you can just yank the old stitch off the left needle, give a short pull with the left index finger to adjust the tension and shove the next stitch further to the tip of the left needle to be worked on (you can do this with your left thumb) all at the same time.

Since you never let go of either needle or working yarn, you do not have to waste time to organize or untangle anything and your movements are on a much smaller scale. This makes you fast, the steady tension of the yarn keeps the tension of the yarn... well... steady, and it also ensures that the neatness of the project overall is the same. The Continental Style is just one fluid sequence of tiny motions.

And what about purls? Yes, alright! The purl is not that different from the knit stitch when throwing, but it can be a real pain in the *** when knitting Continental. All I have to say on this subject is: google for ‘Norwegian Purl’. And that beats the English again.

In short: Knitting Continental gives you the freedom to think about your knitting, your pattern and the construction details, without being harassed by procedural stones in your road. Adjust the process to the workflow, not the workflow to the process!

Maybe it should also be noted, that most of the people, who detest one method, started to learn knitting in the other style. I count myself among those. Although it is curious, that there are (or at least appear to be) more people who change from English to Continental, than the other way around. And why do so many English knitters idolize Elizabeth Zimmermann? She was a Continental!

I have to be honest here, though. Sometimes I do knit in a mixed style. I do that, when I knit with two different colours (e.g. two yarns) at the same time. Essentially, I still knit continental, but when the pattern calls for the next colour, I drop the old yarn and wrap the other around my finger. This does require a lot of untangling and organizing and it does notably slow me down. Maybe, if I practised a bit more, I could use the two-yarns-wrapped-aound-the-left-index-finger method. But since I mainly knit with one yarn at the time, I do not feel the need right now to learn it.

And this is exactly the point: If you always use the same yarn, why not keep hold of it as long as you need it? Why do you have to throw it away so often? And is that why it is called The Throwing Method?