How to Knit Side Decreases

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Kelsey. I’ve been knitting for 10 years and am a member of several knitting organizations. When you’re knitting, you’ve got your knit and you’ve got your pearl stitch, you can make a nice little square there. But you’re also going to want to change the shape of it by adding or taking away stitches. I’m going to show you know how to take away stitches on the knit side. A knit decrease is what it’s called. I’m going to show you two of the most basic, most common ones. The thing about decreases is that they can lean one way or another. The can lean to the left or to the right. If you’re making a decrease on the right side a lot of times you’re going to want to lean to the left, and if you’re making one on the left side a lot of times you want to lean to the right because it looks nicer. It’s not terribly important, but visually, it’s much more appealing. To make a left leading decrease, as we’re going to do here, we’re going to do a slip one, knit one pass the slip stitch over. You often see that abbreviated as S1, K1, PSSO. That’s going to give you a left leading decrease. To do that, you do almost exactly as the decrease says. You start by slipping a stitch which is just like knitting, except you don’t loop the yarn around; you don’t make a new stitch. You put the right needle into this stitch on the left needle, just as you would if you were knitting, and then you just slip it off the needle, transferring it from on to the other. Make sure when you do this that you’re not just transferring it, but that you’re going in from left to right like you would normally when you are knitting. Slip that off, and then knit the next stitch normally. We’ve done the S1 and the K1, so now we’re going to PSSO; pass the slip stitch over. You can do it either with your left hand needle or with your fingers; it’s easier to do it with your left hand needle. Go into that second to last stitch there, and just pull it over and off the needle. When you do that, you get a decrease where this column of stitches going to lean over this column of stitches so it looks like its leaning to the left which is nice. Another way to do this is with a right hand leaning decrease, and that you do by knitting two together. Again, very self explanatory. What you’re going to do is act as if these two stitches are one stitch. You’re going to go in from left to right through both of them, bring the yarn over, bring that loop back trough both of them, and slip them both off the needle. Now you’ve brought this column of stitches over this column of stitches and you get a nice little decrease that leans to the right. Those are the two most common knit side decreases. "