Advanced Knitting: Decreasing Stitches

Video Transcript

"The two most commonly ways to decrease are the slip slip knit (ssk) or knit two together. For the slip slip knit, you're going to slip one stitch as if to knit, slip the second stitch as if to knit, take your left needle tip and insert it into the front of those stitches that you slipped. Wrap the yarn around the back needle, bring it through. I've got one loop. And that is a left slanted decrease. To do a right slanted decrease, you would want to insert your needle into both stitches like a normal knit stitch, and knit them together. And that creates a right slanted decrease. This is really useful in socks and raglan shaping and V-neck shaping because you add a decorative element to your decreases. So here you can see a slip slip knit that I made earlier. You can see that it slants -- that's why I made it -- you can see that it slants to the left. Here is a knit two together, and that slants to the right. And it'll make a very pretty shaping as you go up along. Sometimes you'll have an extra stitch to separate them so that they can work off each other, and it makes a nice V-shaping. Then you would just purl across those reduced number of stitches as you would normally. There are just less of them."