Knitting Fabric on the Bias

Hi everyone I'm Jen Lucas for the knitting circle. In this video let's take a look at knitting fabric on the bias. Knitting fabric on the bias is a really interesting concept in knitting because you're adding increases and decreases in certain places in order to change the overall look of your fabric. I really love using this particular technique on things like scarves or wide wraps or stalls because it takes a stitch pattern and completely transforms it into something new. So let's go ahead and talk about knitting fabric on the bias. Let's take a look at some swatches to understand knitting on the bias. Sort of get a feel of how we can get from here which is just a swatch that has stockinette stitch. I didn't increase or decrease anywhere, how we can get from here to over here, which has the same number of stitches on it throughout the piece. But I've just added stitches on one side and decreased stitches away on the other side. So normally when you're knitting like you have here I have a little garter stitch border around my edge just so it wouldn't curl. You just have nice, flat stitches. You can see that my columns of stockinette stitch are nice and straight and that's sort of the traditional fabric you think of when you think of knitting fabric, right? But you can manipulate the stitches in order to get your stitches to be on the bias. So I just sort of want to look at the steps here. So in this swatch I have worked, you can see here I used a yarn over as my increase just so it was a little bit easier to see. And then I did a knit two together for my decrease. So here, I did a yarn over immediately followed by a knit two together and then work to the rest of my row. And you can see that my swatch is still pretty square that I don't have any of the stitches sort of leaning one way or the other. I still have my nice straight columns of stockinette stitch. If we move the increase and the decrease a little bit away from each other, like I have here you can see that I'm starting to get my fabric to bias. So I have my yarn overs over, along here. And then here, is where I did all of my knit, two togethers. And so you can see where I have the difference between where I have my yarn over and my knit two together that the fabric here is going to start biasing this way. And then once I've done my decreases and I'm just knitting for the rest of the row, you can see the rest of the row. My stitches go back to looking like my original swatch where everything is nice and straight. So this is a really interesting sort of concept to think about because you really can play around with your placements of your increases in your decreases, in your knitting In order to get the fabric to bias the way you like. So then again, here going to my final swatch I've put my increase again. I used a yarn over so it would be very easy to see. I did my yarn over at the beginning and then, did my knit two together decreases at the end of the row. And you can see that the whole entire piece of fabric is biasing. That you're getting all of your stitches, on an angle this way. Where I really like to play around with this is on things like scarves. I personally don't love to knit a scarf because; you're just for most patterns casting on a certain number of stitches and working a stitch pattern for that entire scarf. And it's six feet of just repeating those same things over and over again. I tend to find that a little bit boring for many patterns but what I like to do is experiment with working that stitch pattern on the bias. Where I'm adding a stitch on one side and then decreasing a stitch on the other side to get that stitch pattern to be worked on the bias. For some reason, for me, adding that increase and decrease it makes it more interesting. And then I have no problem meeting the six feet I would need for a scarf. So it is something interesting to play around with especially if you do want to get into designing things like shawls, things like wraps and scarves, it's really great to experiment with knitting on the bias. And there you go. You can see that it's a really interesting concept to play around with. I really love taking stitch patterns out of a stitch dictionary and playing around with them. To see how I could knit them on the bias. To create an interesting rap or stall. I especially love to use this in lay stitch patterns. I hope that you enjoyed this video and if you do, be sure to take a look around at the other videos here on the knitting circle I'm sure you'll find lots of great techniques to try.