So these are my favorite subtle increases. Note I said subtle, not invisible, because physical objects do not work that way! But they’re a little more understated than either yarn over based increases (which tend to leave holes) or knit front back/make 1 increases (which tend to give you twisted stitches, and sometimes sort of also holes).

As always, this will make so so so much more sense if you look at your knitting, think about how it goes together, and understand what you’re trying to do (rather than memorizing a set of steps and working them by rote). I know, I’m mean. But I swear staring at your fabric and thinking about it for a little bit is how you get to be a comfortable, confident knitter (plus it makes it so much easier to see, understand, and fix any mistakes that happen along the way). So, the fundamental idea behind increases is ‘hey, I need another loop (or maybe several loops) of yarn on my needles.’ The details of where you get that loop and what you do with it is what distinguishes different kinds of increases!

For this increase, you get that loop by finding the next stitch on your needle left (the one you’d normally work next), then looking for the stitch immediately below it. Once you’ve found the stitch immediately below the next stitch on on your left needle, you grab that stitch’s right leg (the one closest to you) and lift it up onto your left needle. Now you’ve got a new loop of yarn on your needle (though it will be a bit wobbly and may have a tendency to try and slide over its neighbor, so you might want to hold it in place with your finger), and you can knit into that new loop. Once you’ve knit into that new loop, you’ve worked your increase!

Find the right leg of the the stitch immediately below the first stitch on your left needle.

Lift it up and get it on your left needle, hold it in place with your finger so it doesn’t swallow the stitch next to it.

Knit into the new loop that leg creates (just like you would knit into any other stitch), and keep knitting along like usual.

And yes, there’s a mirrored version (where you work the next stitch on your needle, count down two rows instead of one, grab the left leg of that stitch, lift it onto your needle, and knit into it). But we don’t use that in this pattern so we’re not talking about it in any depth here. But it exists, and is conceptually the same thing, and I feel obliged to mention it just for the sake of symmetry.

When you stack them up, you get lovely, soft diagonal lines with your new columns of stitches arching out from them. (Also when you stack them up, you need a round or row of plain knitting between the increase rounds so you don’t end up working into the same stitch over and over and over again forever, but that’s easy enough to arrange.)

Most folks call these right lifted increases (with the mirrored version being called a left lifted increase), just in case you want to look for other folks talking about how to do them. But as with just about everything in knitting, there is likely more than one name (and sometimes another set of steps gets called by the same name, just to add to the potential confusion). As always, if you have a different name, that’s grand, and if you achieve the same result by a different set of steps, that’s grand, too (because there are no knitting police)!

But this is one of my favorite increases, I use it in a lot of things that start with a small central cast on and grow from there, and I think you’ll like having it in your tool kit!

Admin/Navigation:

• I’m posting a series of videos to go along with our upcoming egg pattern. Anyone with any level of membership (yes even the free one) has access to watch all the videos!
• The pattern will be out in a few weeks. Rampant Nonsense folks always get all the new patterns as they come out, and it will be eventually be available to other folks in some format or another.
• You don’t need to watch the videos if you don’t like to learn that way! You an always use the patterns by themselves, you don’t need to watch this to use the pattern. This is just for folks who like to listen to someone talk them through it or want to see it rather than read about it!