Quick note: Needles vs looms

I have seen suggestions (made to me, or to other people) that if knitting with needles is hard/awkward/painful/impossible, knitting looms are a perfect substitute.

They are, and are not.

I have also seen it said (generally by loom advocates) that anyone who claims that knitting looms are not a perfect substitute haven't tried looms or haven't used them enough. So let me preface this by saying that I own looms, have bought looms, have used looms, and like looms.

And yet looms are not knitting.

They are in one respect: you can produce the same sort of fabric on looms that you can on needles. Pretty much anything you can do with needles -- knits, purls, twisted stitches, increases, decreases, whatever -- you can do with a loom. So if your main focus is the end result, and you don't care how you get there, looms are a perfectly good substitute for needles.

But if you are a process knitter, as I am, where the "how" matters as much as the finished result? They are not the same. They are barely comparable, except that they both use yarn, and both produce knitted fabric.

Knitting, for me, is a very tactile thing. The feel of the needles, the feel of the yarn, the feel of needles sliding against yarn or their partner needle, the motion of making a stitch, the tensioned yarn neither too loose nor too tight ... it all matters. And there is a rhythm to knitting: needle through stitch, yarn around needle, needle back out with the new stitch looped on, sliding the old loop off.

Loom knitting has its own rhythms, its own feel, whether you are doing the basic stitch (wrap each peg, drop yarn, hook each old stitch off over the new) or something more complicated. It is neither better nor worse, but it is not the same. It can't be the same, not objectively.

Subjectively, of course, "to each their own" holds true. Some people will prefer one method over the other, some will enjoy both equally well, and that is all very well.

But please, for the love of all things yarny, do not say that loom knitting is essentially the same thing as needle knitting.

Because it's not.

Really.