How to Work a Latvian Braid

Hi there, I'm Corrina Ferguson for the Knitting Circle. In this video, we're going to learn how to work a beautiful Latvian braid. So let's get started. When you're working a Latvian braid, you need to have a foundation row of whatever your main color is. And then on the wrong side, you're going to do another setup row that's going to be every other color. So what you're going to do on the setup row on the wrong side is you're going to pearl one with your main color, and then you're going to pearl one in your contrast color. So we're going to Pearl one here, and then I'm going to pick up my contrast color and get that going. Pearl one in the contrast color. If you're skilled at fair isle, which I am not, you'll do this way more seamlessly than I will. But basically you're going to go all the way down this row and you're going to pearl one knit one in each so that you have something that looks like this. Let me show you what the finished of that will look like. So here this is the portion where we did the pearl one main color, pearl one contrast color all the way across and I've already started the braid here on the right side. And the way that you work the Latvian braid is you pearl each stitch with his own color, but you always take the working yarn and bring it up over the yarn that you just used. So I just, pearled one of the cream stitches, then run a pearl one of the purple. I bring the yarn up and over and I pearl it. And that's what makes the first half of the braid. See all those little wraps? So when I'm ready to do the next one, I bring it up and over the purple and then I switch, bring it up and over the cream. And we do that all the way to the end of the row. And that is what does the first half of our Latvian braid. So get that done. And then when you do it on the wrong side of the work, you're just going to knit it and you're going to knit it. And you're always going to bring the working yarn up and over. So let's get the knit here. Oops, I don't want my stitches fall off. We don't want that. So I go to knit my first stitch. Obviously on my very first one it won't matter. And then on my second one, I bring the purple up and over, over the cream. And then I go to do the cream and I bring the cream, things get a little twisty here, over the purple and then over the cream and then over the purple. And you can see, bring it over the working yarn. We're going to do a few more so you can see over. It's easier to do on the knit side, of course than it is on the pearl side. But then you can see, kind of get this here, how we've got the braid going. And I'm going to go ahead and pull up a section of the actual shawl so that you can see how beautiful the finished braid is. And it's just a matter of twisting those yarns as you come this direction, twisting those yarns as you come back. Thank you so much for joining me for this Knitting Circle video. I hope you learned a lot and there's lots more to learn and do if you check out our website.