In knitting, there are two main types of decreases involving two stitches – right-leaning and left-leaning. It’s really useful to be able to tell these apart and know which action will produce which result.
Right-Leaning
The first decrease most people learn is knit two together (k2tog). This results in the left-hand stitch on top, causing the stitch to lean to the right. The first stitch the needle enters is the one that ends on top.
Left-leaning decreases are a little bit more complicated. The two most common ones are slip one, knit one, pass slipped stitch over (skp) and slip one knitwise, slip one knitwise, knit two slipped stitches together through the back loop (ssk). In all cases, this results in the right-hand stitch on top.
ssk or skp: left-leaning decrease
Purl Decreases
Decreases can also be worked in purl and similarly, a p2tog is right-leaning and an ssp is left-leaning.
However, purl decreases are most commonly worked on the wrong side of the work. When you look at the back of a left-leaning increase, you also get a left-leaning increase, but it will point towards the opposite side of the work, which is something to bear in mind.
The most common way to finish a top-down sock is by using the Kitchener stitch. This video tutorial takes you through how to work it for perfect looking socks.
Cables can be quite intimidating when you first start knitting them and there seem to be a lot of different variations to learn. If you are using a pattern with a chart, this can make things a lot easier as the cable symbols often look the same as the end result. If you’re not familiar with knitting from a chart, try reading my How To Read Knitting Charts: The Basics post first.
Naming System
There are two main ways of naming cables, depending on whether the focus is on the action taken to make the stitch or the desired end result.
Slip next 2 stitches to cable needle and place at back of work, k2, then k2 from cable needle.
This symbol is usually called either C4B or 2/2 RC. C4B means that the cable uses four stitches in total and the cable needle is held at the back – the opposite stitch is the C4F where the cable needle is held at the front. 2/2 RC means that the cable is formed from two stitches crossing over two stitches and the cable crosses from left to right – the opposite stitch would be the 2/2 LC.
In the C4B notation it is easy to see how to make the stitch, but if a cable is unbalanced, e.g. with three stitches crossing over one then it would still make four stitches in total but have a different look. That is why in my patterns I prefer the 2/2 RC notation. I also find it easier to visualise the end result from just the name.
Deconstructing a Cable Symbol
While you can consult the key every time you come to a cable, it’s easier and quicker to be able to work out what to do based on the symbol itself.
The first step is to determine how many stitches are involved in the cable. While the cable is made from one symbol, it will cover multiple boxes of a chart, as it uses more than one stitch. Use the boxes of the row below or above to count how many stitches are involved. In this example, the cables on the top row use two stitches and the cables on the bottom row use four stitches. I have superimposed the grid lines onto the symbols on the left to make this clearer.
If the cables are uneven, the symbol shows which side uses more stitches by wider or narrower symbols and the diagonal lines meet the gridlines to show how many stitches are used for each side. Here on the left is a 1/2 RC, with the one stitch in front of the two stitches and on the right a 2/1 LC with the two stitches in front of the one stitch. In this notation, the first number is always the number of stitches at the front.
A cable is made of two or more parts. When you look at a cable symbol, you need to identify which part is on top. Here that part is shaded in green, with the part below in blue. Remember in a chart the stitches are building on the row below, like in knitting. Therefore the next stitches on the left-hand needle are the ones in the bottom right of the symbol because in knitting we work from right to left.
If the lines coming from the bottom right go behind the lines from the bottom left, like in the 2/2 RC, then you need to hold the cable needle at the back. Similarly, if the lines from the bottom right cross over the lines from the bottom left, like in the 2/2 LC, then you hold the cable needle at the front.
Knit or Purl
Cables do not have to just use knit stitches, especially in patterns using travelling cables they often involve purls or twisted stitches. This is shown by taking the basic symbol and adding decoration to show which stitches to use.
I create all my charts using Stitchmastery. This software has two main options for how symbols look.
In the Stitchmastery Dot font purls are represented by dots, whereas in the Dash font purl sections in cables are solid black. Once you know how the pattern you are using represents purls and twisted stitches, you can apply that to all the cables in that pattern.
The additional symbols are shown at the top of the cable symbol, as that represents the stitches being worked. The bottom of the cable symbol represents the stitches from the row below. This means that the first stitches worked are the symbol from the top right. For the 1/1 RPC, this means the first stitch is knit and the second (from the cable needle) is purled.
Exceptions
There are always exceptions to any rule and sometimes designers are forced to create non-standard cables. However, this guide should help you understand most cable symbols and allow you to knit without continually consulting the key or looking up definitions.
I’m interviewing sock designers as part of my Level Up Your Socks KAL. This week I’m talking to Dana Gervais about her sock designs and e-courses.
Introduction
RG: Tell me a little about yourself and your designs.
DG: I’m a knitwear designer who specializes in socks! I like to say that I see a pair of socks in every skein of yarn I see and my mission is to set them free. I also enjoy creating sock knitters through free email courses and online challenges. I live in Ontario, Canada with my husband, two kids and lots of pets!
RG: You now have three beginner sock knitting courses, with different heels and directions. Which did you enjoy writing the most?
DG: I love all methods of sock construction, but cuff down socks are my happy place, so I would have to say that the #SockVirgin challenge was my favourite to create. It’s also the first challenge that I ever created, so that also makes it special.
RG: Has anything surprised you from people taking the courses?
DG: I was surprised how many knitters have taken the challenge. When I created the first challenge, #SockVirgin, my goal was to have between 10 and 50 knitters sign up to do it with me. I was completely amazed when the sign up list reached 1000 before the start date.
RG: Why do you think some people think socks are harder than other types of knitting?
DG: I’m not sure where this notion of socks being an advanced knitting technique comes from. It could be because traditionally socks have been worked on DPNs which looks both complicated and impressive to non-DPN users. In reality, socks are not difficult – in fact my grandmother learned to knit socks at school when she was very young; school children would make them for the armed forces.
RG: How do you make decisions for your designs, on what pattern and which heel etc. to use?
DG: I try to change it up with each design so that knitters and I don’t get bored making the same cuffs, heels, and toes all the time. Most designs start with the stitch pattern and the yarn and the rest of the sock evolves from there, I try to incorporate techniques that will show the yarn and the stitch pattern to their best advantages.
RG: Why do you like designing and making socks more than anything else?
DG: I do knit things other than socks, but socks are my happy place. They are portable, they use 1 skein of yarn (most of the time) they don’t require a huge financial investment, they don’t take very long to finish and where I live it’s sock season for at least 7 months of the year, so they are useful.
Sock Knitting
RG: What’s the biggest problem you’ve ever had when knitting a sock and how did you fix it?
DG: One of the benefits of being a designer is that I can often incorporate ‘problems’ and ‘mistakes’ into the design and call it a ‘design element’, but that being said, often I have an idea for a sock in my head that doesn’t translate well after I’ve cast on. Sometimes the yarn and stitch pattern don’t play nicely together, or the stitch pattern creates a fabric that is far denser or looser than I’d like and when that happens, I rip it out and start again. I’ve learned to view frogging as part of the process of knitting and not as an indication of failure or wasted time.
RG: What’s your best sock knitting tip?
DG: There are no knitting police. There is no right or wrong in knitting. Knitters need to use whichever method of knitting in the round that they prefer, whichever needles and yarn that they prefer and use whichever technique works for them – all that matters is that you love the process and the end result.
RG: What’s your go-to resource for sock knitting?
DG: My people! I work with a lot of indie dyers and I always find inspiration in the yarn they create, I have a highly engaged Facebook group and Instagram community of knitters who are always ready to offer an opinion or let me know what they need from me (everything from a specific technique to ideas for knitting socks for diabetic feet). I’m very grateful to be part of the fibre community.
Quick Fire Questions
Toe up/cuff down? Cuff down
DPNs/magic loop/tiny circular? It’s a tie: DPNs and Magic Loop
Cables/lace/colourwork? Yes! All of them
Two at a time/In tandem/One at a time? One at a time (I usually work out any design issues on the second sock)
Metal/wood/carbon fibre needles? It’s a tie: I use them all equally and I love them all equally
Reading your knitting means being able to look at a piece of knitting and recognising what stitch was used. Learning how to read your knitting will make it a lot easier to keep track of where you are in a pattern and help prevent mistakes. If you can see where you are in a pattern by looking, you’ll save yourself from lots of counting and it might make it easier to memorise a pattern.
Recognising Knit and Purl
The basic knitting stitches are knit and purl, so learning to tell them apart is the first hurdle. All knitting is made of rows of loops. If the loops on the row below are behind or in front of the current yarn is the difference between a knit and a purl.
Here we have three columns of knit stitches. You can see that the knit stitches form a v-shape, with the sides of the current loop in front of the loop from the row below. You can see the top of the blue loop is behind the black stitches on the needle, that have just been knitted.
Here all the stitches are purls. Now the sides of the loops are at the back and the top and bottom loop are at the front. This causes purl bumps to be seen, as horizontal bars.
Working flat or in the round
Every time you work a stitch, you are influencing whether the top of the loop from the previous row is at the back for a knit, or the front for a purl. This means that if you turn a knit stitch over it looks like a purl stitch because what used to be the back is now the front.
When worked flat garter stitch is knit every row, but the rows of loops alternate between being at the front and the back. Here the blue stitches were knit, but they look like purl stitches, with the top of the green loop in front. That’s because we’re looking at the back of them.
If garter stitch is worked in the round, you alternate between knit and purl stitches. This is because you are always looking at the knitting from the same side.
Random Ribbing Challenge
Reading your knitting takes practice. In ribbing, the columns of stitches should all look the same, either v-shaped knits or bumpy purls. In order to practice telling the difference between knit and purl stitches, try starting with a random sequence and see if you can repeat it every row.
Choose a smooth, plain coloured yarn and cast on at least 15 stitches. Then use one of the methods below to work the first row.
Toss a coin
For each stitch, toss a coin and make a knit for heads and purl for tails.
Use a die
Alternate between knit and purl, making the number of stitches on the die each time until you run out of stitches.
Now the pattern has been set (don’t keep notes), repeat the row trying to match each stitch to the one below. Remember you’re trying to match how they look, not how they were worked. So if the last stitch was purl, when you turn it over it looks like a knit, so you knit the first stitch.
You should end up with something that looks like this, with identifiable columns of knit and purl. The edge stitches always end up looking a bit distorted, so don’t worry if you struggle to read those.
Cellular Automata Challenge
Once you’ve mastered the ribbing, try this instead. Cellular automata is a mathematical concept where a rule is used to determine the next row of a grid depending on the state of the previous row. Ribbing is an example of a simple rule where the next row is equal to the previous one.
Elementary cellular automata use the cell below and the two cells either side of that to decide on the value of the current cell. There are 256 possible rules to choose from, some of which are more interesting than others.
Start by generating a random sequence of knits and purls as before, set knit as 1 and purl as 0. Then pick a rule and use that to decide whether to knit or purl each stitch depending on the three below it. Assume all stitches outside your grid are knit.
As part of the Level Up Your Socks KAL I thought it would be good to hear from some other sock designers. I did an interview with Anna Friberg, who uses the brand name Yarnesty, about her experiences of sock knitting and designing.
Introduction
RG: Tell me a little about yourself and your designs.
AF: I have known how to knit since I was very small, I don’t even remember who taught me to knit. But I think it must have been either Mum or my maternal Grandma, as I remember that I knit my purl stitches as a Norwegian when I was young, and they grew up close to the Norwegian border.
RG: That’s really interesting, when did you stop using the Norwegian purl?
AF: That was when I was working on getting the same gauge with knitting and purling. Early teens, I think.
I knit a lot until I started uni. After that, I knit a little bit here and there, but not many things were finished. I came back to it in a serious way around ten years ago, and then I became an everyday knitter five or six years ago. That was when I discovered Ravelry and began to read patterns in English.
My first pattern in English was a free pattern from Ysolda: Garter Stitch Mitts.
RG: I think those garter stitch mitts have been in my queue for as long as I’ve been on Ravelry.
AF: They are a really fast knit ?
Today I prefer English patterns. Even if they are available in Swedish. The instructions are more defined in English.
RG:How hard do you find it to follow patterns in another language?
AF: Well I think English is easiest. I can follow Danish and Norwegian as well if I must ?
My day job is as a quality software engineer for software that is used in aircraft. And that includes a lot of inspections and knowledge of processes. Not as much coding anymore.
I live in a house in Ljungsbro, a small village outside a town called Linköping. That is about 2hrs south of Stockholm. I live there with my husband and our two teenaged children.
Designing
AF: It all started out with me listening to the iMake podcast and Martine lured me to participate in a challenge to knit on a sock every day. After a while, I found a way I liked to make my vanilla socks and someone asking me to write down my Vanilla Sock pattern.
I could have written it down on a blog but I like doing things thoroughly. So I wrote down a pattern and put it up on Ravelry. Then I did two or three more sock designs that summer.
Then my friend Jannika told me about Joeli’s Designer Bootcamp on Periscope. And that was when I started to take my designing to a new level. I also used a Tech Editor: James Bartley and that has improved my designing immensely!
RG: That’s great.
You design a lot of stranded socks, what is it about that style that attracts you?
AF: I suppose that is a part of my Scandinavian heritage ? At the same time I think it is a bit of a challenge to have stranded knitting on the leg of the sock, as it can be difficult to get the sock over the heel and arch. So that is why I often have patterns around the sock’s foot instead.
RG: That’s a good way to take the limitations of stranded knitting into account, without losing the lovely designs you can make with it.
You’ve just done your first Mystery KAL, the Town Wall Socks. How did that go and did you find it was different to a normal KAL?
AF: I was blown away of the response. Of course, it helped that MoodsOfColors, a very appreciated Swedish indie-dyer sold kits for the socks in her sock yarn subscription. But even without those kits, many knitters from all over the world was interested in participating. Many who never have tried my patterns before. That was really fun.
A normal KAL is also a good way to get the word out, but I think the MKAL attracts even more. Knitters like to get a pattern in clues and not knowing what comes next.
I also enjoyed all the secrecy! I was very careful not to give away anything beforehand. I only had one test knitter. Of course, the dyer had seen the prototype. And I never gave away if there should be a colour change or not for the next week. Well after a while, the knitters probably saw a pattern, that the colour changed each clue, but they never knew ?
It is a fun way to design as well. It can be a little bit of a franken-sock, but at the same time the yarn and the colours kept it together.
RG: That sounds really fun. Might you do another one in future?
AF: Yes I will definitely do more of that. Not this year, though ? The chatter on social media has been super fun to follow and participate in!
I am super grateful that so many have participated and knit them. And even people have started them after all clues have been revealed. That is lovely to see!
RG: I’m always a bit hesitant with mystery patterns because sometimes I love the beginning but then they go in a strange direction halfway through.
AF: I agree, I have done maybe 6-7 MKALs so far. I have actually loved most of them.
Sock Knitting
RG:So tell me the biggest problem you’ve ever had when knitting a sock and did you manage to fix it?
AF: Most of the surgery I have done on sweaters or shawls. Socks are so small items, so I usually rip back and start over instead of fixing it with surgery.
But, I knit kilt hoses for my son, and I had a simple cable on each side of the leg. (same as on the Fergus pattern). And after having knit half a leg I realised that I had done the cables too wide. Then I ripped only those stitches over the cable pattern (10 stitches or so) and re-knit the cable pattern correctly.
RG: Ripping back can be very useful. That must have been quite fiddly fixing those cables.
AF: Yes a bit fiddly, but with a pair of extra needles, it went quite well.
RG: You mentioned earlier that English patterns tend to be more detailed than European ones, do you think this leads to different types of problems for knitters?
AF: I tend to write very detailed patterns. Most people appreciate knowing whether to, for example, slip a stitch purlwise or knitwise.
On the other hand, if they are used to patterns with open directions, they might skip reading instructions that are crucial for the next section and that can become a problem. I have only had one or two customers with those kinds of problems.
When it comes to more traditional Scandinavian patterns, they are sometimes so open (a bit like vintage patterns) that you have to be a very experienced and advanced knitter to be able to follow them.
Even if I regard myself being an experienced knitter, when I knit other designer’s patterns I want them to be very detailed and especially I want to know what to do next. Of course, I make changes in patterns, but that should be my own decision. Not that I have to, due to a pattern lacking in instructions or if the math is wrong in the pattern.
RG: It can definitely be frustrating if you can’t understand how the pattern is supposed to work.
AF: In that case, I’d rather make it up myself ?
RG:What’s your best tip for knitting socks?
AF: I think that if you want to be able to enjoy your socks as long as possible you should knit them with quite a tight gauge. That makes the socks more durable. Personally, I think that 9 sts/inch is nice for fingering weight sock yarn. And the socks will be thin enough to wear in your everyday shoes.
RG: That’s a very good tip ?.
What’s your favourite resource for sock knitting?
AF: I have learnt loads by reading Sock Architecture by Lara Neel. It is quite a technical book and my engineer brain likes it ?
My patterns tend to have a lot of cables because I really like them. However, if you’re using a cable needle, this can make it slow and awkward. Here’s a video on how I cable without a cable needle.
This was produced as part of my Level Up Your Socks KAL. Join in the KAL for more tips like this.
Charts are really useful for knitting because they look the same as the finished knitting, so it’s easier to know what you’re doing and if you’ve gone wrong. However, they can be a bit confusing if you’ve not used one before. This blog post is going to help you learn how to read a knitting chart.
The Grid
The basis of a knitting chart is the grid. This is a rectangle of squares, where each square represents one stitch. The columns will be numbered, either at the top, the bottom, or both and the rows will be numbered at the side.
A flat knitting chart is read from right-to-left on right-side (RS) rows and left-to-right on wrong-side (WS) rows. To help you remember this, the row number is always on the side where you start. It’s done like this so that the stitches line up as they will when knitted, with a turn at the end of every row.
A chart that is to be knitted in the round will have all the row numbers on the right-hand side, because every row is read from right-to-left. The columns are always numbered from right-to-left as well, to match the direction of knitting. If there are no increases or decreases, the column number is always the same as the stitch number. You can use that to help you keep track of where you are.
The Symbols
Every knitting stitch is represented by a symbol. These aren’t always the same for every chart, although there are some standards. In order to know what a symbol means, look at the key.
The symbols are often designed to look like the stitch they’re describing, so a k2tog is a right leaning decrease, and the symbol slants the same direction as the stitch. If you find it hard to remember which stitch is which, you might find it helpful to highlight the stitches in different colours, so yellow is k2tog and blue is ssk, for example.
A chart is designed to look like the knitting from the RS. So in a flat chart, the same symbol is often used to mean knit on the RS and purl on the WS. This is because a purl on the WS looks like a knit when viewed from the RS.
Example Chart
Here are a small chart and the corresponding knitting, to help you see how the two compare.
When you’re not sure how to read a chart, check it against the written instructions, if these are included in the pattern, or try writing them out yourself.
Here the chart has been placed over the knitting, to help you see where they line up. See how the yarn over holes match the circle symbol on the chart, with the purl bumps below.
No Stitches
If you increase a stitch in knitting, you’re creating an extra stitch where none was before. As a chart is grid based, when we add an extra stitch in the middle we need to create a space for it by having an empty column below. To do this we use something called a no stitch.
A chart including No Stitches
In this chart, the first two rows have three knit stitches, separated by two no stitches, represented by grey boxes. When you get to the no stitch while knitting, you just ignore it. It’s a placeholder, not a real stitch. On row 3 there are two increases, bringing the total number of stitches to five. The no stitches are shown underneath the increases to make the chart line up the same as the real knitting.
On row 5, there are two decreases, bringing the number of stitches down to three again. This means that there will be too many boxes for the number of stitches we now have. Therefore, no stitches are used again.
