Hi! I am Toni Lipe with Toni's Design Studio. Today, we are talking about how to knit. We have just completed our first row of knit stitches. So, we have all of our stitches, new stitches on the right needle and nothing on the left needle. Now to do the second row, we have to switch hands. We put our working stitches in our left hand and our empty needle in our right hand.
Now, when you begin knitting the second row, you will notice that there is this loop hanging off the first stitch and that kind of bothers a lot of people. But it happens to everyone so don t let it bother you. Just simply push that out of the way a little bit and we will continue knitting the way we were before. You will slide your right hand needle into the loop of the left needle, you will wrap your yarn around the right needle and pull the yarn through the loop on the left needle, and pull the old stitch off that left hand needle.
Once again, slide the needle in the bottom of the stitch on the left needle, wrap the yarn, pull that yarn through the loop of the left needle and off. You will notice that after each stitch, the yarn ends up in the back of the work and that's important because as you are knitting, this yarn should always be behind your needle, away from you. We will put it in front for a different type of stitch. But this is the basic knit stitch and as we knit across, you will start to see your knitting grow on your right hand needle. Each pass we make on the needles, this swatch will get larger and larger. In the stitch wrap around, simply pull it off. It really is that easy. Once you get the catch of it, you can start knitting at a faster rate, I promise. But this is the knit stitch and what I want to show you, the last stitch on our swatch, the yarn is still behind. We are starting to actually see the beginning of our swatch. Now, each subsequent row as you are knitting, you will continue the same way. You will switch hands and you will push that little pesky loop out of the way and start just knitting straight across the row. Slide your needle under the stitch on the left needle, wrap your yarn between the two needles, and pull that yarn through the left loop and off the needle. Slide, twist, scoop and off, and you are knitting.
So, we have talked about knitting the second and all subsequent rows. Now, let's talk about the name of the stitch that we are knitting. We will cover this next.