Knitting the Purl Stitch

Toni Lipe: Hi, I am Toni Lipe with Toni's Design Studio. Today, we are talking about how to knit. Right now, we are going to talk about how to do the Purl Stitch. The Purl Stitch is obviously different than the knit stitch but you use basically the same knitting techniques. You are still holding your yarn, your working yarn and knitting needle in your left hand. You are still getting the correct tension by twisting your pinky and holding your yarn. Not tight but snugly.

Now, when you are purling, your working yarn from the skein will be in the front. Remember when we are knitting our yarn was always in the back, when you purl our yarn is in the front. So, keep that in mind as we go through this demonstration. Instead of going into the bottom of a stitch on the left knitting needle, we will go through the top of the stitch. So, we place our right needle and remember that little loop, we just push it out of the way, through the top to the bottom so that our knitting needles look like that. Then we take our yarn and wrap it around the right needle so that it still rests between the right and the left needle and we will scoop that yarn up on the right hand needle and then slide this stitch off of the left knitting needle.

Let's do that again. Yarn in front, wrapped around our index finger, right knitting needle goes down into the stitch on the left needle, so that our needles are crisscrossed. Right needle on top, we take our yarn and we wrap it around the right hand needle and then scoop it through that loop and pull the stitch off and that is the Purl Stitch. I will do a few more and we will go over it again. It takes a little while to get used to doing the Purl Stitch after you have mastered the knit stitch but once you do it's not a problem at all.

So, here we are. Yarn in front, right needle goes down into the stitch from the top of a left knitting needle. We wrap our yarn and then we pull the yarn through and pull the stitch off and that s the Purl Stitch. It's kind of an upside down knit stitch. That s probably a good way to think about it.

So, you continue on, right needle down through the top, through the loop on the left, wrap the yarn, scoop the yarn through and pull the stitch off. Always remember to pull that stitch off, otherwise you will end up increasing every row. So, that is our Purl Stitch. Now, to complete the sequence we would knit the next row. The knit row is on the public side of our swatch. So, we have purled one side, the back side and then we knit a row, just as we did before.

That is the Stockinette Stitch and the Purl Stitch and next we will talk about binding off when knitting.