Knit for Brains

Edie wrote to me and asked about yarn-overs in Portuguese style knitting. Glad you asked, Edie. Thanks for writing. A yarn-over is very easy in PK.

If you want to do a yarn-over between purl stitches – P YO P – you already have the yarn under the right needle. To make a proper yarn-over lift the working yarn up your side of the right needle and then back down the far side so it is back where it started. You will notice that you are in effect wrapping the yarn counter-clockwise around the right needle tip if it were pointing at the ceiling.

For a K, YO, P sequence: you have the yarn on top of the right needle. drop it below as if to purl, then lift the working yarn up your side of the right needle again and back down the far side so it’s under the right needle again, just like for P YO P.

To do a yarn-over between two knit stitches – K YO K – it’s a bit simpler. The yarn is already on top of the right needle. Just put it below it as if you were about to do a purl stitch. When you knit the next stitch you will see that you are lifting the yarn up your side of the right needle and down the far side – as always – and thus wrapping it counter-clockwise around the needle tip.

For P YO K you likewise just leave the yarn below the tip of the right needle.

This counter-clockwise secret is very important for all knitting except maybe eastern European knitting. It assures you will get loops on your needles that are not reversed/twisted. If you look at your loops on the needles you will see that all of them have the yarn leading off to the right on your side and to the left on the far side. If it were reversed you would get twisted stitches.

My cat Lucy demonstrates her version of the yarn-over.

Above, my cat Lucy demonstrates her version of the yarn-over.

There is a myth in p-style knitting that you can do a purl, yo, purl sequence by just lifting the working yarn up on top of the right needle as if to knit, but if you did that you would get a twisted yarn-over that might complicate things when you went to knit or purl into it on the next row up. You can see that it would be wrapping the yarn clockwise on the right needle and you mustn’t do that.

I figured all this out for my article on knitting backwards, which is on the blog. It’s a good thing to know this bit of mechanics, so you can tell what you are doing.

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