Knitting Next Steps - How to Increase & Decrease Stitches

1. Class Introduction: Hi, I'm Lisa, and welcome to my knitting next steps class. In this class, we will expand on your basic knitting skills and learn how to increase and decrease stitches. Being able to increase and decrease stitches is essential if you want to move on to knitting more complex items in future. There are lots of ways to increase and decrease stitches, but we are going to look at two of the simpler methods of doing this in this class. You will learn how to increase stitches using the nit through front and back method and how to decrease using the it two together method. In the group project, we will then use the new skills that you have learned to learn how to knit diagonal squares. You can knit lots of these little squares and join them together to make items such as blankets or scarves. For this class, you'll already need some basic knitting skills. You'll need to know how to cast on how to make knit stitches and how to cast off. If you don't know how to do this, then please check out my other class called knitting four complete beginners, which will teach you these skills. You will only need some basic materials for this class. You will need double knit or dec yarn, and some four millimeter knitting needles. If you prefer to use a different weight of yarn, that's fine. Just make sure that the size of needles that you have is the size that is recommended for that yarn. 2. Lesson 1 How to Increase Stitches: I'm going to teach you how to increase stitches by knitting through the front and the back of a knit stitch. I've already got a row of cast on knit stitches. You knit your first stitch, if you take your needle and as you normally going to knit a stitch. And then pull your loop through normal, but if you leave the existing knit stitch on the needle, don't pull it off, don't slide it off yet. Take your needle around the back. Put it through the back loop. As you can see. Then if we just take that round and knit that. You'll see that you've got two blue loops there, that's the increase. You've knitted two stitches into that one loop. We then slide off the stitch like you normally would. You'll see that you've got three stitches there instead of two. I'm going to just repeat this several times just so you can see how to do it. Don't worry if you don't pick it up first time, if you just keep watching or feel free to pause and rewind and rewatch. I'm just going to do this a few times just to show you how it's. There we go we increase two there. Then this might be knit like normal. Don't slide off, go around the back, put the needle through, knit like normal, pull through and then slide the stitch off. I'm just going to repeat this another few times just so you can see slowly. We've knit the stitch like normal there. Take the needle around and go into the back of the same stitch. Knit it there, and we just pull the loop through. Slide the knitted stitch off the left needle. It like normal. Take a needle around the back, go to the back of the same stitch it again. Pull that loop through. Slide off. You might find this a little bit fiddly at first, but once you got the hang of it, it's quite easy to do. This is to be honest, is the easiest increase stitch that I find. This is the one that I tend to use in my patterns. But there are lots of other increased stitches that you can do, which I'll cover in another class. What we're going to do is we are just going to keep increasing into each and every stitch until we get to the end of the roll. We'll just knit the last stitch and the roll out we knit the first one just so it's nicely rounded off on the edge. You can see that you've got pairs of stitches there. Now, each of those pairs, the first one is your original knit stitch and the second and the pair is your increase. You can easily see if you've remembered to increase correctly because there'll be a little pair. If we just increase again there, I just do these a bit quicker. It front, it through back, slide off, knit through front, knit through the back. Slide off, nitro front, through the back, slide the stitch off. It, back, slide off, to front, back, slide off. Just do the last couple, so you can see. Once you get into a rhythm with that it is quite easy. Obviously, you wouldn't normally increase every stitch and of all this is just so that you can say so you can lend a stitch. Just got a couple left. And then I'll just knit the last stitch. If we then turn the work over from the front, you'll be able to see the pairs as well, actually, you can see that there's always pairs of stitches to like I said before, first the normal stitch ones that increase. You'll see you've got lots of pairs of stitches, and you can see them a bit better on the back as well. You can see as well you've got a little bump on one stitch and not on the other as well. That's indicating which one was the original knitted one, which one was the new one. But you can see very easily if you haven't increased correctly, if you haven't increased in the right place because of the fact that with this stitch, they do sit together in pairs, it is quite easy to keep a track of where you're going if you like. You forget from time to time. What I'll do is, I will just knit a few more rows just so you can see the shape. I'll speed this part up. They go he said, I've done a few rows, and you can now see on both sides where I've increased and where the piece gets wider, the top. 3. Lesson 2 How to Decrease Stitches: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to decrease stitches. I'm going to show you how to knit together. I've just got a couple of rows of already knit stitches here to start off. The way you knit two together is you're putting your needle through two stitches at a time. I'm pointing to the first two in the row, so we go through the back of the second one and the first one normally at the same time, bunch, doing it this way, you can see. I've got the two loops. On the needle at once, and then you just knit like normal. Pull the needle through and catch your loop. You'll now have one loop instead of the two, and then if you just slide that stitch along and off your needle. Carefully, you'll see that your two stitches is now one. Is that easy? You're just picking up the two loops and putting your needle through the two loops instead of the one. But it's how you would normally knit apart from that. I've put the two there, and then I'm just going to knit like normal around the back. Again, if you need to rewatch this several times, don't worry, that's absolutely fine. But I'm just going to keep decreasing the stitches here just so you can see, so just knit into the two stitches. Put on around the back, pull your loop through and then slide your stitch off the left needle. The only difference in normal knitting is you need to make sure that that point of your right needle is going through two loops at once rather than just born. Some is a little bit fiddly. But again, it's something that you do get the hang off. I'm just bringing my needle round so you can see the two loops together there. And then you would just knit like normal. Like I said, is a really easy decrease stitch. Again, this one is the one I tend to use in my patterns because it is the easiest that I find. However, there are other decrease stitches which I will go for another class in future. I'm just going to keep decreasing the stitches. Just doing the two knit together. I'll just keep doing this for the whole row. At the end of this role, you should find because I've decreased into every single stitch, you should have half as many stitches as when you started. Just the last one, it through the two loops. These are just a little bit takes as my first couple of rows, but just pull that slide it off and then you finished your. That's narrowing already at the top. See you've got half as many stitches as what you started with. If you have a look at the back and if you look very carefully and closely, you can see the two loops that you've caught on one stitch. Just like I was saying with the increase, that's a good way of looking to check that you've actually decreased in the right place on your pattern if you're a bit forgetful. It's easy to spot that one. 4. Lesson 3 - Class Project - Knitting Diagonal Squares: In this lesson, we're going to make a little class project. We're just going to make a tiny little knitted square, which we're going to start with two cast on stitches, and we're going to increase the stitches until we get to a certain point and then we're going to decrease back down to two stitches. You're working it diagonally. Just for your first row, if you just knit your first two stitches, Your first row, you've just got two simple knitted stitches. If you turn, we'll go and do our second one. I'm using just a row counter there the little pink plastic counters just to make sure that I'm keeping a count of how many rows I've done. Just to make sure the pattern is right for you. Our second row, we're going to knit into the first stitch. We knit that first stitch. Then we're going to do an increased stitch. We're going to knit in the front and back of this second stitch. N to the front, it into the back. And you'll see that we've now got three stitches because we've just increased one. For the next row, and this will be the same for the next few rows. We're going to knit the first stitch. Then the second stitch, if each row, we're going to knit it through the front and back. This is always going to be our increased stitch, it's going to be the second stitch in each row. Then if you just knit any other stitches in that role. That was just the one there, so I now up to four stitches. We've increased by a stitch in that role as well. What we're going to do is, we're just going to continue doing this until we've got probably around 2025 stitches just to make it a decent size, but you can do it up to however many you want. We just keep doing this increased roll repeatedly and you'll get to a point where your square is as wide as you wanted to be diagonal it will be a triangle shape, and then we'll start doing the decreases after that. You can see now I've kept doing that row repeatedly. I've now got a little triangle. You can see that it's increased on the left and the right sides because it's obviously I've done one stitch every row. It's even increased. You've got your little triangle there. Nice and neat. And then we're going to do our decreased stitches next to make the proble square. The decrease is very similar to the increase. You knit your first stitch. Then we're going to decrease in the second stitch every row. We're going to knit two to. Knit this stitch together, and then we're going to knit stitch in this row. We're just knitting all the stitches in this row, just like we did with the increased row. But we're going to do this the opposite way. We're going to keep doing this decrease row until we get back down to having only two stitches left. We get the same reverse shape and we'll get a s. I'll just knit these last few stitches. We've got that first decrease roll. We turn this round and we go to knit our next roll. We knit to the first stitch and then we do our decreased stitch, so the second and third stitches get knit two together to decrease. We knit this one. It the next two stitches together. Knit that one, bring it through and just slide them to off the left needle. So we decrease that 3-2 stitches. Then if we just knit again all the stitches in this row, I'll just speed this up. H. You can just see at the left and right edges that this is starting to go back in where we've decreased and it's starting to make the the two middle points of your square. We just keep decreasing on every row until you get to this point where you've only got two stitches left on your needle. Got square there. The bottom is increases in the top decreases. Now with these two stitches that we've got left, we're just going to cast them off. We just cast off like normal. I know this is just a little project, but it's actually been of a starting block for a bigger project if you want to do this. What you could do is you could do lots of these little squares in lots of different bits of s and you can then sew them together along the edges to make a blanket bits and pieces like that. The possibilities are endless rely. But as long as you always make sure that you do the same amount of decrease rows as increase rows, you'll make sure that you get it to be a square. You just pull it out here and say it's square shape, you can give it a little block when it's wet, just stretch out if you want to, but there you go, you've got a little square that you can make others and make into a blanket. 5. Thank You!: Thanks for taking my knitting next steps class. I hope that you've enjoyed the course and I hope that you've got some new knitting skills that you can now put to good use. Feel free to share finished pictures of your class project in the class project area of this class. I'd really love to see you finish projects. If you'd like to learn more knitting or co share skills, take a look at my skill share profile where you will see all of the classes that I teach. Thanks.