How To Count Your Rows In Knitting ~ Beginner Knit Tutorial ~ Knitting Rows and Counting

So the very first row that you'll have is your cast on row. It is not going to count as row one. You'll notice that you have kind of a little thing going on here, but it doesn't look like any actual stitch. Depending on the type of cast on you do, it could look more like a knit stitch or a purl stitch. This is just a basic long tail cast on. So you have stitches on your needle. But you're not counting this as a row. Okay, here's my first row of completed knit stitches. I did one row of knit stitches. I have loops on my needle, but I also have little Vs that represent. Those stitches. This is my right side. I'm doing a knit stitch on the right side and then back we have these purl bumps. So when you're looking at these, what is happening is these ridges at the very bottom are part of the stitch. It's bringing the V. This is the back side of your V and this little purl bump on top is the top of your V stitch that got pushed to the back. as you're knitting so when you see these you're not counting this as two rows so you have to remember that kind of this double togetherness is one row so if you're working in garter stitch that is important because it's all looking like purl bumps which i'll show you in a minute but on the front we will have those v's that are very easy to see you just have to make sure that you can understand those stitches to be able to count them to see how many rows you're on All right I just did row two and I'm making a stockinette swatch. So I did a row of purls. This is my wrong side. So now looking at this you see that each row on the purl bump side creates a double row of bumps. So this is only row two but I have four rows or four yeah rows you could say of bumps. Understanding that when you're looking at purl bumps will help you count your rows. This is row two. I have two rows of purl bumps and stitches on my needle. On the front side, the right side, we now have two rows of these, which are a lot easier to count, a lot easier to see. So if you're working in stockinette, it's not too bad. If you're working in a garter, like this watch here, You really need to understand those two rows. So looking at this, this is one row, this is one row, this is one row. However, because we're working in stockinette and we're doing knit stitches on every single row, we have... kind of double rows on the back side. This is 22 rows of stitches but if we count we'll have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. We have to double that because this side has 11 as well. So understanding how garter stitch differs from stockinette is really important if you're doing big swaths of it and you're trying to count your stitches. These will just line up, and you can see the difference in how these look. These are right on top of each other. They look as like one solid piece, whereas there's a line that you can see because we're getting knit stitches on both sides. So if we pull this apart, you can see a knit stitch in between. If I pull this apart, it doesn't pull apart, and there's no knit stitch because these are all purls all worked on the same side, whereas these are all knits. Worked back and forth on each row. So let's do one more row so you can see how those purls look again. Alright, I finished row three. You can see that I'm starting to curl a little. If you don't know why the fabric curls, I just did a tutorial about the anatomy of a knit and purl stitch and explained why you get curling in stockinette. So double, you know, go check that video out if you haven't seen it yet. But looking at this, we can easily count from the bottom. One, two, three. rows, we do not count the row that's on our needles. So we're looking just for those Vs when we have three. Now on the backside, again, we did just purl, or we did, this was row three, so we did all knit stitches that produced the purl stitches on the back or the purl bumps. So again, we're counting the double row. As one row, so we look for 1, 2, that's 1, 1, 2, that's 2, 1, 2, that's 3. So understanding what both sides look like is important to be able to count those stitches. So you start all the way at the very bottom, right above your cast on to begin counting. Same with the front. Sometimes that very first knit stitch is very tiny because if your cast on is too tight or you're kind of just starting off a little tight, that little first V might be hard to see. Pull on your stitches, look for it. One, two, three, and then we're ready for our next row. So that is how you're going to read stitches to be able to tell what row you're on. If there is a certain stitch that you are interested in knowing how to read the row numbers on, leave it in the comments below and I will try to get that made for you. But make sure that you like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell so you'll be alerted when the next tutorial comes out. I'm Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After and thank you for watching.