Yarn Over Knitting

Once you begin to graduate from merely knitting and purling stitches you are going to begin to learn a few other little tricks that can really make a difference in whether or not you can do some of the more complex knitting patterns. Increasing and decreasing rows is certainly one of those types of techniques. A yarn over stitch is one example of a way to increase stitching.

Yarn over also makes a small hole in the row and is often combined with a knit two together stitch to create a little arched gap in your knitting. You must always use an increase along with a decrease like this if you want to keep the same number of stitches in a row and not actually increase.

The do a yarn over all you need to do is loop the yarn around your right hand needle counterclockwise, or back to front. You will then just make the next stitch as you normally would. The extra loop will still be there in the next row, just treat it as if it were a regular stitch.

You can do a yarn over when purling as well. In a knit stitch the yarn comes around the needle and is left in the back, in a purl stitch the yarn comes all the way back around to the front so that you can catch it in the purl on the next row.

There are other terms by which the yarn over is known such as: YO (for Yarn Over) and yarn forward (as well as abbreviations of these words like yf, yfwd) and even yarn forward over needle (yfon). but regardless of the name, the technique above is the same every time.