Increasing Stitches

Toni Lipe: Hi, I am Toni Lipe with Toni's Design Studio. Right now we are going to talk about increasing. A lot of times as we were knitting our project, we need to increase the number of stitches on our needle to accommodate sleeve width, collars, also to different methods. The pattern where we usually tell you to increase. Sometimes they specify what type of increase they wanted to use, other times you get to pick the increase that you would like to use in your own work. Right now, I am going to demonstrate three of the most commonly used increases to increase the number of stitches on your needle. I am just going to knit two stitches first one two. What the first demonstration that I am going to do is knitting in the front and in the back of the stitch. This will take one stitch and make it into two. So, what you need to do is take your needle as if you are going to knit slide it under the stitch, wrap your yarn and pull the loop off out but leave that stitch on your needle. You don't want to pull that off yet. Then we are going to knit into the back of a loop. So, we slide our needle into the back loop, wrap the yarn around and pull the loop out and the yarn off the needle. Now, we have two stitches in the place of one.

Let's do that again. Knit into front loop wrap your yarn around and pull your loop out but leave the stitch on the needle then knit into the back wrap your yarn around pull out the loop and then slide your stitch off the needle. Now where we have done increases in two stitches we now have four stitches in place of two. The next method for increasing is to knit between the stitches or make one. What you do is you reach down here is a layer in between your two stitches right here and what you do is you reach down into there as if you are going to knit it, wrap your yarn and pull the loop through. Now that makes an extra stitch but as you see here also creates a little hole a little island. Let's do that again. Pick up this ladder from the row below wrap your yarn and pull it through. Now we have created two extra stitches but there are little tiny islands where we have picked up that stitch. Sometimes that might be a very lovely design element. That might be exactly the look you are looking for but if not you would going to choose a different increasing method.

Now, the third method is knitting into the stitch below. This way as you see we have that row below here that we have just knitted and there is a little loop back here. We can stick our knitting needle right in that loop. I will show you where that is right here and just knit a stitch into that loop. So we put it through, wrapped our yarn and pull the loop out and we have created an extra stitch and then we actually knit the next stitch. This keeps the fabric from having holes or islets in it. So, if you want to keep things solid you would knit into the stitch below and then knit the stitch and you can see that little purl knob right here that little loop and that's where we pick it up or not, there it is. Knit pull off the loop and knit the next stitch. These are the most common methods of increasing stitches. I think I have added about six or eight different stitches to our project here and as you can see the first increase creates a little bore in your work, the second increase creates little islets and the third increase are pretty much invisible and you wouldn't be able to tell that if actually increase stitches there. So, there are three increase stitches and next we will talk about decreasing our work.