Yarn Amounts: Tunisian-vs-Knitting

[ReniC]

I have been practicing knitting a little (believe me- a little, since I put a unconscious death grip on my right needle- and it hurts my knuckles something awful- LOL).

I am wondering if knitting- knit stitch uses more yarn than Tunisian- knit stitch. I am going to try to make a swatch of each, but was hoping for a more "experienced" answer since my knitting leaves a lot to be desired.

[Granny Square]

I did a yarn-use experiment a while back and came up with the below:

 

edit- all swatches used the same amount of yarn and same sized 'tool' except the bottom one, which used the same amt. of yarn but a bigger needle to try to match the gauge of the crochet sample.  Note, although the garter and sc samples were the same size, the garter used 3x more stitches!  That's why knitting seems so slow.

 

I didn't do Tunisian; but it is so dense, my guess is it would use at least as much as SC, if not more. 

 

What style of knitting are you learning?  If English, have you tried continental?  Continental combined is even easier on the hands but requires you to 'read' your stitches, which isn't hard (and I think may be easier for crocheters since we are accustomed to use our hooks in a greater variety of ways than knitters do IMHO--front loop, back loop, into a variety of combinatins of loops in the chain etc).

[Granny Square]

Ok, bad guess on my part - I just swatched TSS, same sized hook and similar thickness yarn, here it is lined up against my old SC, garter, and stockinette swatches -  looks like TSS takes less yarn than SC, and more than the stockinette -- but really, just a teensy bit. 

 

 

I'd originally made a Ravelry project of this to disprove that 'crochet takes 2 or 3 TIMES more yarn than knitting' that I kept reading. If you keep the variables as close to equivalent as possible, not so much.

[ddc]

That's really interesting. Thanks for the work and for sharing the results. 

[ReniC]

Hi GrannySquare-

Thank you for going to the trouble to make these test watches. It is interesting to see how different styles of fiber-art take on different tones and also different amounts of yarn.

Your question: I have been trying to learn Continental knitting off and on for years. I've come to the conclusion I do not have all the patience needed to learn this art at my age, at least all the stitches anyway. Oh, I'll keep trying, but, I don't think I'll be making too many large afghans at my age. (LOL). Guess I'll just stick with the crochet, painting, embroidery, machine quilting, cross stitch..................