How to Work From a Knitting Pattern

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Allison from ImagiKnit in San Francisco and I'm here today to talk to you about how to read a knitting pattern. I have one here. The most important thing when looking at a knitting pattern is to make sure that you have the materials required and that you have a glossary of terms. This will tell you what the knitting terms are that are used in the instructions for the pattern. So as you can see here, the materials needed for the scarf are size eleven needles, two schemes of yarn... For this demonstration I just have one. If you don't want to use a particular yarn that a pattern calls for, make sure to check in with your local yarn shop so that they can assist you in getting a yarn that's the proper thickness for the pattern. You also will need a darning needle and some scissors. When using a knitting pattern, the most important thing is to get the gauge or tension that a pattern calls for. In this particular example, you should get six stitches per inch in the pattern stitch. So prior to starting your scarf, you will make a gauge swatch. So once you've completed your gauge swatch and you know that you're getting the proper tension so that your scarf isn't bigger or smaller than what you're expecting. Go ahead down to the instructions. Here it says, "Cast on thirty stitches," so we'll go ahead and do that. So once you've completed your cast on and left a long enough tail to weave the end in later, go ahead and we'll move to row number one. The first stitch will be a knit, like that. And then as you note, the next part of the sentence is between asterisks. That means any time you see that in a knitting pattern, that means that you will continue the part between the asterisks over and over and over until you've completed the row. So we'll continue all the way until there is one last stitch and then we will knit it. So following here, we'll slip one, knit one, use our left needle to pass the slip stitch over, but before doing that we will wrap and knit one more stitch. So again, slip, knit, pass the slip stitch over, but wrap and knit first, and pull through. Slip, knit, pass the slip stitch over, but knit first and pull both through. So we're coming to the end of the row, so we'll repeat for the last time the portion between the asterisks. Slip, knit, pass the slip stitch over, but knit and pull through. Then we've come to our last stitch so we will knit one and we've completed our first row of the pattern. Now, we will come into row two. The entire portion of row two is between the asterisks, so we'll repeat that over and over and over. And it is a pearl two together. So if you ever have a question about what the stitches are, make sure to refer to your glossary. Pearl two together here, but prior to pulling off the left needle, you will pearl the first stitch again. Pearl two together, pearl the first again, then pull them off the needle. Okay now, we've completed rows one and two, so we're ready just to continue for this pattern, repeat rows one and two until we have the desired length, leaving enough to bind off at the end. We will then bind off, break the yarn and we'll weave in the ends and we'll have a scarf like this to wear."