Technique Tutorial: Improved Version of “Increase One into Next Stitch” (inc1/kfb)

So ever since I first graduated to the world of increasing and decreasing, I’ve always thought the increase where you knit into the front and back of a stitch looked really sloppy. It was wonderfully convenient especially in lace knitting to just magically turn one stitch into two, and definitely had it’s functional advantages over the “make one” increase. However, it really looks like you just stuck a stitch in there. It has no continuity and doesn’t work with the flow of what your knitting at all either. There’s also no way to do it such that it looks symetrical with another set of the same increase. This issue has bothered me to such a degree, that I would litterally find ways to substitute this sort of increase with a “make one (right/left)”, just for the sake of aesthetics.

However, today, I was working on a little baby girl sweater, and the sweater construction required the magic ability to transform a single stitch into two. I was about to grit my teeth and use the hated and less than refined increase technique when a bit of pregnancy perfectionism kicked in. I had to figure out how to make this thing look symetrical. So I played around with a couple different methods for about 20 minutes, and finally found the perfect solution. I was so excited by how wonderfully smooth it looked that I spent the next 45 minutes figuring out how to best document my success. Below is a tutorial, so that you too can implement this perfect little increase into your knitting.

Tutorial

This is what a normal inc1 or kfb looks like when its finished:

See that little bump that almost looks like a purl stitch on the right hand needle? That’s the new stitch that just got created with this technique. Depending on the application, this is very sloppy. You don’t want to look like you have random  purl stitches thrown into your knitting, it just looks amateur, unless you place it just right. It also isn’t centered over the stitch it was created from again throwing off the look of your knitting.

Here’s how you avoid that look…

1. Insert right hand needle into next stitch from the back of the stitch.

2. Pull out a bit of a loop and place it on the left hand needle so it looks like the following:

You now have essentially two sets of loops to knit through which will give you the two stitches out of one functionality that this technique is required for.

3) Knit into the back of the first loop.

4) Do not knit the second loop yet! Insert your right hand needle into the loop from the front and slip it onto the right hand needle.

5. Turn the stitch by inserting left hand needle into the stitch from the back, and slipping it back to the left needle.

6. Now you can knit this stitch through the front loop.

Voila! You have a perfectly symmetrical increase!

If this was a little confusing, I have a youtube video of this technique here.

It should make some of the maneuvers a little clearer.

I hope this was helpful!

Advertisement