Remember that old high school cheer? "Lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up, sit down, fight, fight, fight!" It actually has some use in knitting. How you decrease you stitches can make your garment look professionally created. Done wrong, it can make an otherwise beautiful sweater receive the comment, "Oh, it's homemade." And that is the last thing a knitter wants to here. Handcrafted and homemade are two different things.
Decreases in knitting are usually done two stitches at a time. They are done to taper in an area of knitting to accommodate shaping. Armholes and necklines are good examples of places that knitters will use a decreasing stitch. Remember when you decrease, your number of stitches on the needle will change, so if you count stitches to keep track of your work, don't panic. It is supposed to be less!
When you decrease, don't assume the pattern is going to know that it is important to you to have the slant of the stitches correct. Some patterns are put together with every decrease reading K2TOG. Perhaps for a beginning knitter this is appropriate as this is a fairly invisible decrease, but if you have any experience at all, you want the slope of the garment appropriate to the form it is fitting.
As an example, consider a sweater back as though you were looking at it. From the back the armholes move inward toward the center of the garment. If the decreasing stitches do not lean to the right on the left side, and lean to the left on the right side, the whole back of the sweater will be cattywompous.
- The easiest way to make a stitch angling to the left is to K2TOG TBL, Knit Two Together Through the Back Loop. This could also be done on the wrong side of the fabric (as in stockinette stitch) and would read P2TOG.
- The easiest way to make a stitch angleing to the right is to K2TOG, Knit Two Together. This could also be done on the wrong side of the fabric (as in stockinette stitch) and would read P2TOG.
These are only two methods of decreasing. They are the simplest. Other more complex methods that are appropriate to other garments will be covered in the future.
Decreasing on a garment can be approached with two different methods and techniques. Decreasing with knitting two stitches together is easy and the knitter doesn't have to keep track of left or right sloping. If done on the edge of the garment these decreases are invisible when seams and edgings are completed.
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