Advanced Types of Knitting Stitches for All Your Projects
Check out these advanced types of knitting stitches -- everything you need to craft intricate and beautiful patterns.
Basic types of knitting stitches are sufficient for most projects, but if you start doing fancy patterns in sweaters or afghans, you might need to learn more than your basic knit and purl stitches. In fact, this is where most people get frustrated and confused, sometimes giving up on knitting altogether. Don't let that happen to you! Use this handy guide to tackle any project you can find!
Advanced Stitches
A common stitch you'll see in advanced patterns is the yo (yarn over -- nothing to do with a yo-yo). This involves deliberately making a hole in your pattern (you might have made a lot of these when you first learned to knit, probably accidentally).
Of all the types of knitting stitches, the yarn over feels the strangest -- like you're doing something wrong. Don't worry! All you do is knit a stitch, wrap the yarn around the right needle to make a new loop, and then knit the next stitch in your pattern. When you come to the loop you made again, knit it like an ordinary stitch.
Another common stitch is a slipped stitch. When you slip a stitch, it just means that you move the stitch from your right needle to your left without doing anything to it -- knitting or purling or what have you. Patterns usually abbreviate slipped stitches with the letters sl.
In combination with the slipped stitch, you might see the letters PSSO. That means pass slipped stitch over, and it's not really one of our types of knitting stitches, but it's important to know. PSSO is another way to reduce the size of your work. When you do this type of stitch, you slip your stitch, knit a stitch, then lift the slipped stitch over the stitch you just knit and drop it right off the needle (like casting off).
Not Exactly Stitching
Other types of knitting stitches you might see are inastarsia, Fair Isle, entrelac, and any other variety of strange names. These aren't really stitches so much as patterns. In brief, inastarsia and Fair Isle are methods of knitting with two or more colors while entrelac produces a triangular pattern. There are other methods, too, many of which involve knitting and purling within the pattern itself!
The important thing is not to get intimidated. It can be tricky to master the different types of knitting stitches, but it's well worth it in the end!
