Quick Tip: Duplicate Stitch

Hi, I'm Mary Beth Temple and I wanna talk to you about the duplicate stitch and when to use it. Now, the duplicate stitch is exactly what it sounds like. You're going to take some yarn, you're gonna take a yarn needle and you're going to duplicate an existing knit stitch. Now, when am I going to need to do that? Uh There are a couple of instances particularly in color work if I'm doing a complicated color work pattern and there are only two or three stitches in a specific color instead of knitting them in. I may go back later and put them in with duplicate stitch because that's gonna cut down on the number of bobbins I have to use when I'm knitting my color work. And speaking of color work, if you're doing a complicated color work pattern and you have made a mistake instead of ripping back and trying to figure out where you were in the pattern, go in with the needle and the correct color yarn and fix your mistake and nobody will be the wiser. So there's a couple of different uh ways to do it. We're going to do vertical and horizontal. So for vertical, I'm gonna come up through the back of the work. Now, for this stitch, for duplicate stitch, you do not want to split the plies, you want to make sure that you're using your needle in the same path that your yarn would have gone otherwise. So I'm gonna duplicate this stitch right here. So I'm going right under the stitch above it and now I'm going to go back down in the stitch below exactly where I came out. It does make the work a little bit thicker. But again, this is a technique you're generally only going to do over a few stitches. So I'm gonna come up in a stitch, follow that thread path and down in the same stitch. I'm gonna do one more time in my vertical column coming up in the next ditch. Do not split the plies, follow that thread around and go back in the same stitch. So that's vertical. So like I said, you can see it's the tiniest bit thicker, but it's in the same gauge essentially as the other stitches. Now, if I wanna go horizontal, gonna come up in a stitch, trace it around, go back in the same stitch and then come up in the next stitch and you can do this either right to left or left to right, follow that stitch around and go back into the same stitch one more time up in the next stitch, trace that stitch back in the same stitch. So, duplicate stitch is a great technique to have whether you're adding color or fixing color.