It’s become clear that some of y’all can’t tell the difference between twisted and untwisted stitches (which is fine, no one is born knowing that, we all have to learn it somewhere!). And before we can talk more about the nifty decrease thing, you’ve got to to have a good handle on that. So let’s take a look! Because you can train your eye to see them, and once you do, you’ll understand what’s going on with your fabric so much better. (There’s a video of this over here, it’s on a public post so anyone can see it.)

Look at the fabric between my fingers. One of the columns of stitches there is twisted, the rest are not. Can you see which one is twisted? If you can’t see which one is twisted, can you see that one is different, even if you can’t quite tell why it’s different?

If you can’t see it, spend some time looking closely at how the yarn moves within each stitch. Try visually tracing the path a strand of yarn would take as the fabric was being knit. Like…sit with the picture and really see what you can notice about it. Training your eye to see stuff is all about, well, spending some time looking and noticing what you see and thinking about what you notice.

If you’re not seeing it, there’s a trick. Twisted stitches get easier to see when the fabric is under a bit of tension. So here’s that same piece of fabric just stretched out a bit side to side. See if you can see the column of twisted stitches here.

Again, if you can’t, see if you can just notice one column that’s different from the others. And try tracing the path the yarn would take across one row of stitches. See if there’s one stitch where it does something different.

Pay special attention to how the legs of each stitch are arranged. On non-twisted stitches, the legs of each stitch are beside each other, not crossed. So when you pull the fabric apart, the legs of each stitch will move farther apart. Untwisted stitches open up wide when you stretch the fabric side to side. On twisted stitches, the legs are crossed (or, you know…twisted). So when you pull the fabric apart, the legs of twisted stitches will cross more tightly. Twisted stitches close up tight when you stretch the fabric side to side.

And, just in case you still aren’t seeing it, here the same picture as above, just with the legs of the twisted stitches traced in pink, and the neighboring untwisted stitches traced in green.

See how the two sides of the pink column are drawn together, with one leg of the pink stitches going under the other leg? And see how the two sides of the green column are spread apart, with some distance between the legs of each stitch? Yeah, that’s the difference between twisted and untwisted stitches.

Once you train your eye to see them (and to see your stitches in general) everything gets easier. Because once you can see if a stitch is twisted or not, you can just work with it. You don’t have to memorize of follow a bunch of fiddly directions about how to slip it or whether to go into it from the back or how to manipulate it. You don’t have to wonder if you have your stitches mounted the same way the directions assume you do. You don’t have to worry if you picked your stitches up the right way if they slip off your needle. You just look at your stitch and go ‘ok cool, we want that one twisted, lemme shove my needle in from whatever direction I need so it’ll be twisted’ or ‘yeah, we want that untwisted, lemme shove my needle in from whatever direction I need so it’ll be untwisted.’

Once you start to see and understand your fabric that way, absolutely everything about your knitting gets easier. So go…look at your fabric. Get up close and personal. Trace the path yarn takes as you work different stitches. Tug on it and see how it behaves. Train your eye…and then we’ll talk about what you can do once you see what’s going on!