Knitting breakthroughs

Ahh, the joys of being self-taught.

This week while poring over diagrams of a new knitting stitch I'm trying to learn, I realized that for the five years I've been knitting, I've been doing the most basic stitch—"the knit"—wrong.

Sigh. At least I figured it out before making a mess of my latest project. This is the first time I've tried anything that wasn't just a basic stockinette or seed stitch, so it never really mattered before.

Incidentally—although I don't think this had anything to do with my learning the stitch wrong—I taught myself to knit while I was in Paris, so my book is all in French. This means I don't really know any knitting vocabulary in English. For those interested, here's my new stitch:

The yarn is Plymouth baby alpaca grande paint, #8819. It's a bit expensive but is gorgeously soft (and the color is much better than this photo makes it out to be). Here's the stitch ("Grille ondulée"):

Cast on a number of stitches evenly divisible by 12.
1er rang: *4 mailles croisées à droite (glisser 2 m. en attente derrière le travail, tricoter les 2 m. suivantes à l'endroit, puis les 2 m. en attente), 4 m. endroit, 4 m. croisées à gauche (glisser 2 m. en attente devant le travail, tricoter les 2 m. suiv. à l'endroit puis les 2 m. en attente)*, répéter de * à *
2e et tous les rangs pairs suivants: à l'envers
3e et 7e rangs: à l'endroit
5e rang: *2 m. end., 4 m. croisées à gauche, 4 m. croisées à droite, 2 m. end.*, répéter de * à *
Répéter toujours ces 8 rangs.