I am the Kat that Walks By Itself

Does anyone know why "knitting" starts with a silent 'k'? (goes and looks up knitting) Ah, it is related to "knot". Middle English. Doesn't explain why the 'k' became silent, though. Oh well.

So, I have decided to forget the needles and explore knitting with two hooks. This is different from "knooking", which uses one hook and a long trailing string or ribbon. Instead, you use two (Tunisian crochet) hooks and position them like knitting needles, only they have hooks on the end. This is apparently quite common in Portuguese/Turkish/Egyptian/Peruvian knitting, though they also have specific techniques which involve looping the working yarn around the back of one's neck, which I don't really feel like trying at this point. Maybe at some other point.

The advantages of two-hook knitting:
1. It is much easier to pull the yarn through the loops with hooks than with needles.
2. One is less likely to drop a stitch, because you don't remove the stitch from one hook until you have the new stitch on the other hook, and also because it is less easy for a stitch to slip off a crochet hook than a knitting needle, because the hook itself tends to get in the way.
3. It is much closer to needle-knitting than one-hook knitting is, which means I should be able to follow directions meant for needle-knitting.

The disadvantages of two-hook knitting:
1. It is harder to put the hook into the required loop than a needle. This is the trade-off. One thing that happens is that instead of the hook going into the loop that I want it to, it also catches the loop below, which can be messy, confusing, and cause an unintended stitch-increase. This may get easier with practice. It may also be easier with pointier hooks, I'm not sure.
2. I haven't yet found any videos on YouTube that show this method of knitting.

So far, it's promising. Done a garter stitch swatch, and have switched over my current one-hook-knitting project to two-hook-knitting. Slow going, but practice should hopefully make somewhat perfect.

I tried doing some knooking yesterday, using a bamboo Tunisian crochet hook with an extension made of a plastic tube attached to the end of the hook (one of a set of them which I bought on E-Bay - like this). I was finding it quite difficult, and now I have figured out why. It was the plastic tube. It was too thick, and thus getting in the way.

See, an "official" Knook hook is a crochet hook with a hole drilled at the end, and a cord which you thread through the hole. This works because the cord is small enough not to get in the way. Likewise, there are extended Tunisian crochet hooks which work because the extension part is coated wire which is about 1mm thick, not a plastic tube which is 4mm thick.

So it isn't that I can't do knooking, it is that I was using the wrong tool for the job. Good to know (and now I need to get more appropriate hooks...)