I’m going to show you how to do the yarn over stitch. You’ll normally see this written in a pattern as YO, and that stands for yarn over. You would use a yarn over to create a lace-like design in a pattern, and you’ll see this quite often in different patterns.
At the end of this video, I’ll show you a couple of finished examples of how they look. So let’s get started.
I’m going to knit this first stitch here. When you do a yarn over, you’re actually creating a stitch. So if it’s within a pattern, you don’t want to keep creating more stitches because that would throw off the pattern. You will usually do a knit two together somewhere within the pattern to balance it out.
In this case, I’m going to knit two together, then I’m going to do the yarn over. I come to the front of the needle and wrap it around. Then I’m going to knit the next two together. You’ll see that it’s over the needle instead of behind it and under it.
I’m going to knit two together again, go to the front, over the right-hand needle, and then knit two together off the left. Pull both of those stitches off, and you still have the same number of stitches, even though you just did a decrease.
Again: yarn over, knit two together. Yarn over, and I’ll get to the end so that way I can show you what you would do next to knit those yarn overs.
Then, in the front, knit two together. I just try to put it in the middle to keep it nice and straight for when I’m ready to knit the next row.
Again, in the front, over the needle, and then knit the next two together. Front, then over that needle to knit the next two again. Over.
When you get to the end, you want to make sure: did you do a yarn over and a knit two, or did you do a knit two and a yarn over? You can look back and see. I started with the knit two and then a yarn over, so I want to make sure not to forget that last yarn over.
Then I’m going to knit one, because you cannot have a yarn over at the very end—at least it wouldn’t be easy enough. But I have the yarn over right before that last stitch.
Then I’ll turn my work around. You’ll see how I knit the yarn overs. I’m going to purl them on the back so they’re knits on the front. Here’s that first yarn over—it’s just kind of like the yarn is laid over, and you’re just going to knit it like a regular stitch. It creates a little hole in the pattern.
Just purl it. If you were to knit it, you would just go in this way with the yarn in the back.
When I turn it over, I’m going to quickly show you how to yarn over with a purl next. It’s not really a different technique, just a different way to do it.
Let me get to the end of this, just purling all the way across the back again so it looks like a knit on the front. Usually, yarn overs are knit; however, sometimes you’ll have a purl on the front with the yarn over, which creates more definition in the fabric.
Let me get to the end here—I’m almost there—and then I’m going to show you what I did.
We talked about how I did the knit two together and then the yarn over. If you notice, they’re kind of staggered. The next row, I would normally do a yarn over after the first stitch and then knit two together to create this type of pattern.
If I just kept doing it the same way, the yarn overs—the little holes—would go straight up in a line.
If you needed to purl right after a yarn over, what you would do is wrap your yarn like we said, then come back around and put that yarn in front for a purl, and then just do the purl as normal.
If you were to do another yarn over with a purl, just wrap it around one time and do that purl just like that. It gives a little different look, with the purl in front instead of the knit in front.
That is how you do yarn overs.
I will show you an example. This is one of my patterns called Shoots and Ladders, and it has two sets of yarn overs here and here, and they’re staggered as well. There’s also a matching cowl doing the same thing. Those will be in the links below if you’re interested.
And that is how you do the yarn over.
