To begin, you need your cast on stitches!  Hold your full needle in your left hand, as pictured above.

the knit stitch:

This was hard to do holding the camera with one hand, but just hold one needle in each hand and you’ll be fine.  First, you need to have your working yarn to the back of your stitches, otherwise you could accidentally do something akin to a purl stitch and we don’t want that right now.  Using your right hand, insert your right needle under the first stitch/loop on the left needle from front to back, so that your right needle is behind your left:

Now, wrap your working yarn in a counterclockwise motion (or under your right needle) so that it is now between the two needles:

Now you’re going to use your right needle to pull your wrapped working yarn underneath the top stitch on your left needle:

And to finish the stitch, lift the top loop on the left needle off.  If you’ve cast on 14 stitches like me, you’ll now have 13 loops on the left needle and 1 on the right:

Yay!  You’ve made your first knit stitch!

the garter stitch:

Now we’re gonna do the rest of the row using the same steps.  A fabric completely made in the knit stitch is called the garter stitch and yields a textured and stretchy fabric.  Go ahead and insert your right needle under the top loop on the left needle from front to back, wrap your working yarn around it, use your right needle to pull your working yarn under that top left needle stitch, and then let the top left needle stitch off the needle.  Keep going.  Your row will look like this when finished, and all of your stitches will now be on your right needle:

I know it doesn’t look like much happened here.  That’s OK.  Turn your needle around, hold it in your left hand, and knit across the row again:

Turn your full needle around and put it in your left hand, and knit across it again:

If you keep this up, you’ll end up with a swatch like this:

Yay, you’re knitting!  You can keep going and make this a scarf, washcloth, square for a blanket, hotpad, whatever you want!