Working a Slip, Slip, Purl (ssp) Stitch
Jen LucasDescription
Once you’ve mastered the knit stitch and purl stitch, you can explore other stitches that will help you in creating a wide variety of knitting projects. Most commonly, knitwise decreases are used to shape fabric; however, occasionally a pattern contains a purlwise decrease. In this video, knitting expert Jen Lucas shows you how to work one of these decreases. She’s specifically demonstrating the slip, slip, purl (ssp) decrease.
SLIP, SLIP, PURL (SSP)
This decrease is commonly worked on the wrong side of your work, where you would be working the purl stitch. That’s not always the case though; sometimes you’ll use it on the right side of your work if you are purling stitches on the right side. You might also find ssp decreases used in many different decorative stitch patterns. In the video, Jen shows the slip, slip, purl when worked on the wrong side of the fabric, when working in Stockinette stitch.
When looking at the ssp decrease on the purl side, or wrong side, of the fabric, it’s not that easy to identify where the decrease is placed, as it blends in with the other purl stitches. When you look at the fabric from knit side, or right side, you can easily see where the decreases are placed. The ssp stitch leans to the left when you are looking at it from the right side of the fabric in the example in the video.
Work the slip, slip, purl using these steps:
– Slip a stitch from the left needle as if to knit to right needle
– Slip a second stitch from the left needle as if to knit to right needle
– Slip both stitches back to left needle and purl the two stitches together through the back loops
The slip, slip, purl creates one stitch where there were two, making it a single decrease. It’s often paired with the purl two together (p2tog) decrease since that decrease leans in the opposite direction. Using these two decreases together creates mirror image decreases, which makes your knitting look very polished.
Hi, I'm Jen Lucas for the Knitting Circle, and in this video I'm gonna show you how to Slip, Slip Pearl. The Pearl wise decreases are typically known as being a little bit more tricky than those knit wise decreases but I don't want you to be scared of the Slip, Slip Pearl. With a little bit of practice, you'll have it mastered in no time. So let's go ahead and get started. The Slip Slip, Pearl stitch is typically worked on the wrong side of your work.
That's not always the case but most often that is where you're going to see this particular stitch is on the wrong side. So I have a swatch here where I have worked a Slip, Slip Pearl on the wrong side rows, and you could see right along here that's where I did those decreases. Where you can really see these decreases though, is if we flip it over to the right side and you can see here, that's my Slip, Slip Pearls which I created on the wrong side of the work. So a Slip, Slip Pearl creates a left leaning decrease when you're looking at the right side of your work. So let's go ahead and get started on how to do that.
I'm on the wrong side of my swatch and I have my yarn in front because I am going to be pearling. I'm going to slip the first stitch as if to knit. I'm going to slip the second stitch as if to knit and I'm going to then slip both of those stitches back to the left-hand needle. I now need to pearl those two stitches together through the back loop. This is really the tricky part of the Slip, Slip Pearl.
So I'm gonna bring my right hand needle around and through the back loops of those stitches, and I'm gonna pearl those two together. And that creates the Slip, Slip Pearl. I'm gonna go ahead and show that to you again. We're going to slip as if to knit, slip as if to knit, bring both of those stitches back to the left-hand needle. We're then going to pearl those two stitches together through the back loop, by bringing our right needle around and to the back, going through both of those stitches through the back loop, and then pearling those two together.
You can see it doesn't really look like much here on the wrong side of our work, which we're currently on, but again, as you can clearly see in our swatch, when we're looking at it from the right side you can see those nice, neat Slip Slip, Pearl decreases. That's it. As you can see, it's really not too hard once you get the hang of it. With a little bit of practice, you'll be using it in a wide variety of knitting projects soon. I'm Jen Lucas for the knitting circle.
I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you back here again real soon.
Thank you for the video. It would be great if you showed this also using the continental style.