regular purl, one needle size smaller and carefully tightening each stitch: same size as knit
combination knitting, same needle size, trying to make the stitches loose: slightly smaller than knit
I want a fast method that I don't have to pay attention to! !!
Do it incorrectly!
I'm serious. You're supposed to wrap the yarn around the needle one way or the other, so pick a stitch and try doing it the other way to see what you get. It'll affect the size slightly. It may end up with you having to untwist stitches later, though, depending on how you do your other stitches.
This is not a good idea, but it's what happened to me by accident as I learned from library books (no internet then).
Comedy option: twist all your purls or knits and don't untwist them later
I’ve been doing it this way for a while and it’s definitely faster and easier than conventional, even with untwisting, but the purl stitches it produces are on the small side compared to the knits, especially if I’m not careful about it.
yep I wrap my yarn differently for the purls (that's what I mean when I say "combination", I have to ktbl on the regular rows) and they definitely end up a little smaller! I'm slowly getting better at making those looser though
Are both your purls and knits are being "set" around the barrel of the needle, and not the tip? I find the most consistency when as a general rule I: a) don't adjust the working yarn's tension until I slide the RH needle deeper into the new loop and b) don't tighten any stitch beyond what is absolutely necessary to get the yarn to wrap around the needle. I try to use the needle itself and only as much as possible to set my stitch size, and it ends up quite conistent I think--I can even switch to English without too much of a difference (altho I only do so in dire finger pain/deadline situations--not only do I not love english on its own it feels risky still, gaugewise lol)
Also, if you need to aggressively tighten your purl stitches to get them in line with the knits, have you considered doing the opposite? Maybe lossening up your knit stitches will help!
in general I knit quite loosely, I think (I often go down a size to get gauge). I'm fairly sure I set both types around the main shaft, but maybe not...
