Gap-tastic Cowl Take 2

I'm knitting another Gap-tastic Cowl.  I'm knitting this for a couple of reasons: 

1. I donated the first one I made.
2. I had yarn in my stash to make one.
3. I want to learn how to knit Continental.

The main reason is the third one.  I really want to become a proficient continental knitter.  There is nothing wrong with knitting English, which is how I currently knit, but I'm having a lot of what I call "mechanical" knitting pain.  For awhile, I just thought that most people knit tolerating some level of pain.  After asking around, I found out that this isn't true and that it might be how I knit that is causing the pain.  Most of my pain comes in the form of neck pain, which while in the past was mostly minor, has grown considerable worse recently.  I was told there are a couple of reasons and simple fixes I could try to help alleviate the pain:

1. Certain stretches can help reduce the pain.
2. Remember to take a break and move around after knitting for so long.
3. Change how you hold the yarn.
4. Try to change how you knit.

I'm trying to work on incorporating all of these things, the biggest of which is trying to change how I knit.   In the meantime, it was recommended to me to take some sort of pain reliever to help while I'm incorporating these changes and healing.  All of these things have been helping me, but so far I'm still in pain.  Though, I can't say for sure right now how much of the pain is directly from knitting and how much is still left over from when I slept funny and woke up with neck pain.  Either way, I'm still in pain but refuse to stop knitting so it's not getting better as fast as it could.  

Gap-tastic Cowl and my new obsession: nail polish!

The good news is that I'm doing reasonable well knitting Continental.  I had the knit stitch down before starting this project, but was really struggling with my purl stitch.  After watching various videos demonstrating the purl stitch, I still really couldn't get the hang of it.  I ended up consulting a friend who knits Continental style and she showed me how she does the purl stitch.  That really helped a lot.  With some practice, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable with the purl stitch.  My gauge is still looser than I'd like it to be, but I know that I can work on that in time.  My plan with this is to start with simple projects and work my way up to more complicated projects.  I'm hoping it will go the route of when I first learned to knit where at first your stitches are okay, but not uniformed and all you need is to keep at it to make it all fall into place.