Lifted Increases (RLI & LLI)

Hi everyone. I'm Jen Lucas for The Knitting Circle. In this video, let's look at lifted increases. Specifically, the right lifted increase and the left lifted increase. As you know, there's so many different ways to increase and add stitches in your knitting, but I really like these lifted increases because they keep the fabric looking nice and smooth and they also can actually be very decorative. So let's go ahead and look at those lifted increases. Here I have a swatch that shows my lifted increases. I have my right lifted increases right over here. And I have my left lifted increases over on this side. So you can see that it creates a nice, smooth fabric. We don't have a hole, we really don't have any bumps but you can see our increases coming out along here and along here. So these are really great especially for things like sweaters where you might be working shoulder shaping or something. I think they create really beautiful, smooth increases and they actually are a little decorative too, while keeping the fabric nice and smooth. So let's go ahead and take a look at doing these increases. So I just have a swatch here. I'm just going to go ahead and knit a couple stitches away from my edge. And we're going to go ahead and do the right lifted increase. So to do the right lifted increase we are going to insert our right needle with the yarn in the back. We're gonna insert it into this stitch which is one stitch below on the next stitch. So here's our next stitch that's on the needle. We want to go one stitch below, to this one right down here. We're gonna go from back to front, like this. We're going to put it up on to our left-hand needle, like this. We're going to then just knit this stitch. That's our increase. And then we still have our original stitch on the needle. And so we're gonna just knit that one as well. And so right there, we've made our right lifted increase. Just knit another stitch and show that to you again. So we're gonna go into the next stitch, one stitch below. Take our right-hand needle and go from back to front. We're gonna put that stitch up on our left-hand needle. And then we're gonna knit it, and then knit the original stitch. And you can see that's the first one I made. And there's the second one that I made. I'm gonna go ahead and just do that one more time. We're going to be working the next stitch one stitch below. So again, this is the next stitch, one stitch below would be this one right here. We're going to go in from back to front, lift that stitch onto our left-hand needle, knit it, and then knit the original stitch and we've done our right lifted increase. Now for the left lifted increase, we're going to be working off of a stitch that's on our right-hand needle. So to do the left lifted increase we need to work into the stitch that's two rows below the last stitch on our right-hand needle. So if you look here, we have our stitch that's on the needle. This stitch here then would be one row below and then right below it here would be two rows below. So again, we're going to have the yarn in back cause we're still knitting. And we are going to insert the left needle from back to front, into the stitch two rows below, just like that. Now we have that stitch up on our left-hand needle. We are gonna now insert the right needle into the back of that stitch like we're knitting it through the back. And then we're going to knit that stitch. And that creates the left lifted increase. So again, I'm just gonna knit a couple stitches here. Then to do the left lifted increase, we're gonna go into the stitch on our right-hand needle, two rows below. So one, two. We're gonna insert the left needle from back to front into that stitch. And then we're going to take our right-hand needle and knit the stitch this way and off. I'm gonna go ahead and do that one more time. To me, the left lifted increase is a little bit trickier than the right lifted increase. Again, into the stitch two rows below. One, two. We're gonna insert our left needle from back to front. And then with the right needle we're gonna go into the back of that lifted stitch, and we do that by going from front to back this way, wrap the yarn around like we're doing a knit stitch. And those are lifted increases. There you go. It's super simple. With a little bit of practice, they really are very easy to work. And these are some of my favorite increases to use in my knitting projects. I'm Jen Lucas for The Knitting Circle, and I hope that you enjoyed this video. Be sure to check out all of the other great content on our website. I'm sure you'll find lots of great videos you enjoy.