Learning different knitting techniques is essential if you want to become any sort of a decent knitter.  There are certain techniques that you will not really have to worry about until you are more experienced and are taking on more complex projects.  Then there are others that are used in almost all patterns and these are known as the basic knitting techniques.  You won’t find these knitting techniques that hard at all once you get a bit of practice.

Of course the first and one of the most basic knitting techniques to learn is just to plain knit.  Hold your needles in your hands and then you want to have the yarn in your left hand, holding just the string coming out of the ball of yarn.  Now if you are left-handed you may want to switch things around because it may not be comfortable for you to hold things like this.  It is completely up to you and whatever you feel more comfortable with.

To make a basic knit stitch you want to put the tip of your right needle into the loop most at the top of your left needle.   Take the yarn and wrap it around the top of that needle once, making sure to keep it nice and taught but not too tight.  Always make sure that you are pulling the yarn in the opposite direction or you will be making a purl stitch.   Then you have made the knit stitch and for the purl you just do it all backwards.

When you purl in your knitting pieces you will see a nice patterned look as there is a noticeable difference between the two types of stitches.  You will also need to learn how to pick up stitches if you want to follow even the most basic kitting patterns.  You would need to do this if you were making sleeves for a sweater or had any other circumstance where you needed to add more stitches on when you were already part way through a pattern.   Your goal is to not have people be able to tell where you cast on more stitches because you want to keep everything neat and tidy.

One of the most important things to remember when knitting is to keep the yarn held at the same tightness throughout the entire piece.  You do not want to work hard on your knitting only to have to undo it afterwards because there are parts of it that are looser than others and it just does not look right. It takes practice to become a good knitter.   Remember, even the best knitters you know had to start somewhere.