Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm going to show you how to pick up stitches on your knitting.
It is great for doing things such as mitered squares, for edging at the edge of shawls,
for picking up pieces of garments....
And so what I have here is a swatch
that will show you how to do it at different spots. I have garter stitch with an edge stitch,
garter stitch without an edge stitch, and I have stockinette stitch
with some decreases. So let me start at the edge.
And always, always work from the front side
when you're picking up stitches. So first of all, what I'm going to do is
go into an edge stitch here.
I like to generally go into both the stitches.
I'm going to go underneath. You're going to see kind of a v-shape
on the top of the edge stitch. I go underneath both of those
stitches that create the V. I fold the yarn in half,
and that just gives me a starting place, and then I pull
it up through. When you're picking up, always work with the hand
that you usually use to do knitting. I usually keep the yarn in my right hand,
so I'm going to do that here as well.
So I'm going to go straight in, and pick up.
If you want a decorative edge, you can go into the back of the edge stitch.
Pick up, and that little edge stitch is going to show
in front of the work then.
And that looks rather pretty as well.
So that works. You can either do it without anything showing, or with something showing.
Now when you get to this part of your knitting, you're going to have some
rough edges, and you want to get below those rough edges.
I usually go in between ridges, like this.
You're just going to stab, in all cases, straight through
the fabric, knit the stitch, and pull it up.
That's all there is to it.
Straight through, knit through, pull up.
When you get up to the stockinette point, things get a little, teeny bit trickier.
You want to make sure you're not too high on the edge. Because if I go in
and try to pick up up here, first of all I get kind of a hole, as you can see.
And second of all, this edge isn't particularly pretty.
So go in as low as you need.
If you find that you're getting a hole anywhere--which I'm
doing fairly well and not--then just go below it.
But I am coming up on a very definite hole.
And that is right here, where I made my decreases.
I don't want to pick up into this hole. So I'm going to go
beyond it...
pick up, and when I do, it closes up the hole nicely.
pick up, and when I do, it closes up the hole nicely.
Again, here's another little hole,
so I'm going to go up above it, and pick up.
If your pattern doesn't specify how many stitches to pick up, generally
you'll pick up in stockinette about 2 stitches for every 3,
or 3 for every 4.
And in garter stitch you'll pick up one for every ridge.
So now I have picked up a whole line of stitches here,
and I can just knit back, and keep going, and make some kind of a fun
little shape! www.reallyclear.om