Knitting Step By Step

The actual process of learning to knit from scratch

Most people pick up yarn and needles and immediately get frustrated because nobody tells them what a stitch actually looks like while it's being formed. I spent about three weeks untangling my own mistakes before I could knit a row without thinking about it. The gap between watching a video and doing it is real. Here is how it actually works. You start with the cast-on, which is just creating a row of live loops on your needle so you have something to work with. There are half a dozen ways to do it, but the long-tail cast-on is the one I use. It gives you a flexible edge that doesn't distort when the fabric stretches. You make a slip knot, put it on the needle, then use your thumb and index finger to open a yarn loop and pull new loops through. It feels awkward for about forty-five minutes. Then it stops feeling awkward. Once you have your stitches on the needle, you knit the first row. Hold the working needle in your right hand and the needle holding the cast-on stitches in your left. Insert the right needle from left to right into the front of the first loop on the left needle. Wrap the working yarn counter-clockwise around the right needle tip. Hook it back through the loop and slide the old loop off the left needle. That is one knit stitch. Do it again. And again. Your hands will cramp. Take a break.

Knitting Step By Step for people who want to stop pulling loose threads

After you finish a garter stitch swatch — which is just knitting every row until you have a small rectangular piece of fabric — you learn the purl stitch. It looks different because you insert the needle from right to left, but honestly it's the same motion flipped horizontally. Most people struggle with purling more than knitting because their wrist has to twist into an awkward position. You can fix this by switching to the continental style, where you hold the working yarn in your left hand instead of the right. It cuts your stitch time roughly in half once you get the muscle memory down, though the learning curve is steeper upfront. Here is something nobody mentions: tension is the real enemy, not technique. Your first dozen rows will be tight because you're gripping the needles like you're afraid of dropping them. I learned this the hard way when I tried to make a dishcloth and couldn't fit my needle back into the last stitch of the row because my stitches had shrunk down to nearly nothing. The fix was simple — relax your grip and let the stitches glide. After a while your hands figure out the right amount of pressure on their own. The next thing you need to understand is how to read your work. A knit stitch looks like a little V on the fabric surface. A purl stitch looks like a horizontal bump. If you've been knitting every row, you'll see V's on both sides of the fabric — that's garter stitch. If you knit one row and purl the next, you get stockinette, which curls at the edges because the two sides want to behave differently. I wasted about two hours on my first scarf before I realized the curling wasn't a defect, it was just stockinette doing exactly what it's supposed to do. I switched to knitting every row and the curling stopped.

When you're ready to actually make something useful, the simplest project is a basic scarf using the knit stitch only. Cast on twenty to thirty stitches depending on how wide you want it. Knit every row until the piece measures about sixty inches from the cast-on edge. Bind off by knitting two stitches, then passing the first stitch over the second and off the needle. Repeat until one stitch remains, cut the yarn, and pull it through to secure. That's it. A scarf takes me about six to eight hours of actual work spread over a couple of weeks. There are limitations to this approach. Garter stitch scarves are heavy and dense because every row is a knit stitch, which uses more yarn than alternating knit and purl. If you want something lighter and drapey, you need stockinette with a garter stitch border to flatten the edges. Also, hand-knitting a scarf with worsted weight yarn and US size 8 needles will make something that weighs closer to four hundred grams — that's substantial. If you're making gifts for other people, think about whether they want something warm and stiff or light and flowy, because the difference comes down to stitch pattern and yarn weight, not skill level. The biggest practical problem I run into is dropped stitches. If you're working in stockinette and a loop falls off your needle, gravity will pull it down through every row below it until it reaches the bottom edge and creates a ladder run. I once spent forty-five minutes fixing a dropped stitch halfway up a sweater panel using a crochet hook to manually recreate each loop. Don't let that happen. Work in a well-lit area, don't rush, and if you're knitting in the dark on the couch like I sometimes do, expect to frog back at least one row as insurance.

If you want to move past scarves, the next logical step is learning to increase and decrease stitches. A knit front and back increase adds a stitch by knitting into the front and then the back of the same loop without dropping the original. A simple decrease is a knit two together, where you insert the needle into two stitches at once and treat them as one. These are the foundation of shaping — sleeve cuffs, necklines, hat crowns. Nothing complex about them, just mechanical additions and subtractions to the stitch count. One detail that matters more than it should: needle material. Aluminum needles are smooth and fast but slippery — stitches slide off them too easily if you're not careful. Bamboo or wood needles grip the yarn slightly, which keeps your stitches from accidentally unraveling. I switched to bamboo needles after losing three rows on aluminum during a busy evening and never looked back. The trade-off is that they're a bit slower to work with because of the friction, but the security is worth it for anything where you might get distracted. Yarn choice is the other thing that makes or breaks your first projects. Cheap acrylic yarn is consistent and washable but tends to split when you're inserting the needle, which means you keep catching two stitches at once instead of one. A mid-range merino wool or a blended yarn with a bit more twist will give you cleaner stitch definition and fewer fumbling moments. I spend about twelve to eighteen dollars per skein now and it shows in the finished fabric. The first cheap yarn project I made looked sloppy by comparison and I almost gave up knitting entirely because I thought my technique was the problem when really it was just the yarn.