Increasing at the edge

There's a lot of ways of increasing a stitch when you're knitting. Different methods have different effects on the fabric you're producing, and your choice depends on the results you want and on your own personal choice. This post is about one way of increasing right at the very edge of a row when you'll be picking up stitches from the edge later on. It's a traditional Shetland technique and Gudrun Johnston uses it in her Hansel. It involves making a yarn over right at the very start of the row, and it gives a set of little loops that are very easy to pick up from. What's more, it gives a very elastic edging, which is what you want in a stretchy squishy hap shawl. You can see the edge it gives in the picture above: the triangle starts at the bottom right and grows with those loops on each edge. What's more, it's uninterrupted garter stitch right to the edge, with no increase line a few stitches in. You work it right at the beginning of a row, before you knit the first stitch. Put the right hand needle behind the working yarn... ...and making sure that you have a strand of yarn crossing the right hand needle, put the tip into the first stitch of the row. Wrap the yarn around the tip of the right hand needle and work the stitch as usual. The yarn over will make a loop of yarn around the needle to the right of that first knit stitch. That loop is your increase. You want your edge to be nicely stretchy but not sloppy, so when you come to the end of the row and it's time to work the yarn over that started the previous row, work its back leg: And that's it - a stretchy edge with a set of loops just begging to be picked up and knit as a border, as you can see in the very first picture. If you're not going to pick up from it, though, then it's probably not the best increase, and that loopy border wouldn't be much fun to seam. It's certainly not the only way of doing these increases - Jared Flood uses knit-front-and-back in his Tweed baby blanket. It's fun to work, though, and you could substitue Very soon, we'll be blogging here about how to pick up stitches for the shawl border. But we don't need to worry about that yet - knitting the centre will take a wee while!