Working a Yarn Over at the Beginning of a Row

There are some stitch patterns or some knitting patterns even that are gonna start with having you work a yarn over at the beginning of a row. And it's one question that I get from knitters quite often. How do you even work a yarn over at the beginning of the row? Because traditionally, you're working a yarn over in between two stitches, so it's locked right in place. But it's actually really easy to work a yarn over at the beginning of your row. And I'm gonna show you how to do that. So when you go to knit a stitch, normally you would just stick your right hand needle into the stitch and knit it. To do the yarn over at the beginning of the row, we're simply going to bring our right needle under the yarn and then knit this stitch. So what we've done there is we've made our yarn over, and then we have knit. And then you would just keep working your pattern as normal, whatever your pattern's telling you to do, and you would admit to the end of your row. But let's take a look at this if you were going to do this on the purl side. So if you're working a wrong side row where you need to do a yarn over, normally when you purl, you would just purl like this with your yarn in front. So I like to just start with my yarn and back, and then insert my needle, and then purl. And then we're gonna just purl our way across. Again, you would just be following whatever your particular pattern is telling you to do. And then let's quickly just look at how we work into these now that we've made our yarn overs at the beginning of a row. So here we have come to the point where we have one stitch left on our left needle on the wrong side, and this stitch here is our yarn over. And so we're just simply gonna purl it. And that's it. And now, let's just knit back on our right side here to get to that yarn over that we had done at the beginning of the purl row. So here, I'm gonna knit this last regular stitch, and then here is my yarn over. Now, with this, your particular pattern might tell you exactly what to do. So if you were to knit the stitch normally, you would go into the stitch this way, and then knit it. And that would close the yarn over. So you may want to knit it through the back loop in order to keep it open. So this is making a bit of a loop on the side, but maybe that's the look you're going for. Maybe that's the reason that you are doing your yarn over at the beginning of a purl row. So if we take a look here on the knit side, 'cause I did work a few extra yarn overs, you can see that I am getting these little loops where I did the yarn over at the beginning of the row. But if you're doing something like a mesh stitch pattern or something like that that calls for you to work that yarn over at the beginning of the row, it's just gonna blend right into your fabric. So you can see it's actually very easy to do a yarn over at the start of a row.