Hook and Needles: Knitting and Crochet Blog (cool stuff, techniques, and things I find)

I recently got an email from a reader asking me how to increase a certain number of stitches evenly in a row. This is something that is often asked from crocheters as they follow amigurumi patterns, but you can also find this instruction in some knitting patterns.

There are some calculators that will do this for you: Increase Evenly Across a Row and Decrease Evenly Across a Row. But if you want to be able to do it yourself here’s how.

Increasing

What you need to do is  calculate the interval between increases: number of stitches you have now / number of stitches to increase

So for example, if you have 24 stitches, and you need to increase 6 (for a total of 30), you need to increase one stitch after every 4th stitches (24/6=4). A 5th stitch needs to be created.

If you are knitting, that would mean: *K4, M1* 6 times, or K2 *M1, K4* 5 times, M1, K2 (so you don’t have the increases in the edges).

For crochet, since you increase by crocheting 2 stitches in the same stitch (the 5th stitch is added in the same space as the 4th), it would be: *sc3, sc 2 in 1* 6 times.

Decreases

To calculate the interval between decreases, it’s easiest to do it as follows: number of total stitches after decrease / number of stitches to decrease.

For example, if you have 24 stitches, and you want to decrease 6 (for 18 stitches in total), you would decrease one stitch after every 3rd (18/6=3). The 4th stitch needs to disappear.

For knitting, you will knit 2 stitches, and the third one will be knitted with the 4th one: *K2, k2tog* 6 times or K1, *k2tog, k2* 5 times, k2 tog, k1 (so the decreases don’t fall on the edges).

For crochetting, also the 4th dissapearing stitch will crochetted with the 3rd: *sc 2, sc2tog* 6 times.

I know math is not a popular subject, but if you happen to like this sort of thing, I recommend  you check out Math4Knitters.