Day 8: Yarn Over

Hi, everyone, my name is Jen Lucas from The Knitting Circle, and welcome back to our 14-day learn to knit series. In this lesson, I'm gonna show you how to work a yarn over. A yarn over is a basic increase, and it's very easy to do. It's all in the name. We're going to take the yarn over the needle. Like the knit and purl stitches, I'll show you how to do this both using the English method with the yarn in my right hand and the continental method with the yarn in my left hand. Let's go ahead and take a look at that yarn over. Let's talk about the basic yarn over. The yarn over can be used for all kinds of things in knitting. We have something like I have here which creates this eyelet stitch pattern. And the eyelets are created by doing the yarn overs, which make all these holes in our knitting. And for this particular stitch pattern, and we will talk about this stitch pattern some more down the road when we're knitting our cowl, is we're going to be working yarn overs and then knit two togethers to create this fabric. So this is a great example of using yarn overs, and you can see how it creates this beautiful, beautiful fabric. You might also see a yarn over in something like this where it's used to shape a piece. So I had cast on down here, and then up here is where I had bound off. But I added yarn overs along each edge of this little swatch of knitting as I was working, and you can see how it's changed the shape. So over here we're using yarn overs to create a fabric, and you'll see this used all the time in lace shawls and anything that has a lace pattern in it where the yarn overs are creating beautiful fabric. And then over here we're using yarn overs to create shape. So by increasing, I was adding stitches onto my knitting needle using the yarn over. So let's go ahead and take a look at how to work this yarn over. And I'm just gonna show you how to do a basic yarn over when you're knitting your stitches. So to start, I will do it using the English method with the yarn in my right hand. So I'm just gonna start by knitting a couple of stitches. And so to yarn over, we have the yarn in the back of our work because we were knitting. To yarn over, we're gonna bring the yarn in between the needles to the front and over to the back again to knit. And I'll just knit a couple stitches. So here's where we've created our yarn over, right here. And you can see we've made a tiny little hole in our knitting. But that's what you want with the yarn overs. You do want the hole. That's what creates your lace patterns, or it creates a design feature if you're using it on, say, to increase at the shoulder of a sweater or something like that. So again, the yarn was in the back. We're just bringing the yarn in between the needles to the front and over the needle to the back again to knit. And that's all there is to the yarn over. So let me go ahead and just show you how to do it with the yarn in my left hand, or continental method. So I'm just gonna knit a couple stitches. And then to yarn over, it's the same exact thing. We're gonna bring the yarn to the front and up and over the needle to the back again. So the yarn, again, was in the back as we were knitting. Gonna bring it in between the needle to the front, up and over the needle, and knit. I'll just knit the last three stitches, and then we'll take a little bit of a look at what we're doing here. Here we go. So we have created our yarn overs here, so we've added a bunch of stitches to the needle. And you can see our little holes here. So what happens when you get back to the yarn overs when you're on the next row? So let's just take a look. I'll just quickly work back. We'll just purl. And again, doesn't matter which hand you have your yarn in. You're gonna purl whichever way you like to purl. And when we get to that yarn over, you can see here's our yarn over. We have this big hole. Because we're purling, we're just working into this like we would normally work a purl stitch. So let's say we were going to be knitting. You might bring the yarn back. Now let's say we're knitting up to the yarn over. Here we've come to a yarn over. We just insert our needle just like we're normally gonna knit. You just wanna keep that yarn over nice and open. You don't wanna somehow try to go into the stitch the other way to close it up. So here if we just look again. So over here where I had done the purls, you can see on the wrong side, there's how it looks. And here we have these bumps 'cause we switched to knitting over here. But you can see those are your yarn over holes. It's a very easy increase. It's the easiest increase and very versatile in your knitting. Isn't that easy? All you do is put the yarn over the needle. And now you know a basic increase, and you know the basis of lace stitch patterns. It's really great. Yarn overs are very versatile in knitting. You'll see them on any kind of project. Thank you so much for continuing to join me here at The Knitting Circle and joining me on your knitting journey. I'm excited to see you back here tomorrow for the knit two together decrease.