Welcome to this Arnall-Culliford Knitwear tutorial on grafting together stitches.
I'm going to show you how to join two sets of stitches to give a completely invisible finish.
You need a tail end of yarn that is about four times longer than the total width of
the edge that you're looking to join. If in doubt, leave your tail nice and long because there's
nothing worse than running out halfway through. Thread your tail onto a blunt tapestry needle,
and then I'm going to show you the basic set of moves to join the two sets of stitches.
So the little rhyme I say to myself is knit, slip, purl, purl, slip, knit, and those are the
movements I'm going to do throughout apart from at the very beginning. And at the very beginning,
we're going to work through the first stitch on the front and rear needles to just set it up, and
the way I remember that is that it's going to be, when you get going, knit, slip, purl, so we're going
to omit the knit, slip, and we're just going to go through the stitch on the front needle purl wise.
And then for the set up on the rear needle, it's going to be the same. So it was knit, slip, purl,
purl, slip, knit, on the rear needle , and we're omitting the purl
slip. So we go through the rear needle knit-wise.
So our setup was pass the needle purlwise through the front needle and knitwise through the rear
needle, and now we're into knit, slip, purl, purl, slip, knit all the way across our row of stitches.
So into the front needle knitwise and slip off and then purlwise and leave on.
So that's knit, slip, purl, and I do all of that before I pull my tail through.
And then on the rear needle it's purl, slip off, knit and then pull through.
So let's do the routine again. Go into the first stitch on the front needle knitwise, slip off,
and then purlwise, and leave on, knit, slip, purl.
And then on the rear needle purlwise, slip off, knitwise, leave on and pull through.
You're always keeping the strands of yarn below the needles. You don't want
your yarn that you're sewing with to go over the top of the needles.
And I suggest that you leave the strands of yarn fairly loose as you do this to begin with
and then once you've done a few stitches we'll tighten them up.
I've now worked along a few stitches, and you can see that it's a little bit gappy along that edge.
So all I'm going to do is gently tug
any slack in my sewn stitches along
to tighten up the edge, and then I carry on. And I always work in sets
of a stitch from the front and a stitch from the back. So knit, slip, purl, purl, slip, knit. If
you have to stop grafting at any point then I highly recommend you end with your purl,
slip, knit because then you know when you come to start again you're going to be at the front.
As you come to the very final few stitches just check that you're happy with the tension
of the stitches in the edge that you've grafted and you don't need to tighten them up at all.
And then just at the end here we're going to continue working knit, slip, purl,
purl, slip, knit, always keeping the yarn below the working needles.
Knit, slip, purl.
Purl, slip,
knit. And now when we come to only have one stitch left on each needle we're just going
to do the bits we can do so on the front needle we can go knit, slip, but there's no second stitch
to do the purl through so we just ignore that. And then on the rear needle we go purl, slip, and again
there's nothing to do and knit through so we just leave that as well. And then we pull through
both of those to finish off and that's allowed us to join our cast on edge nice and seamlessly.
This was a provisional cast on edge, that's why I've just called it that,
but you could equally do the same with your live stitches and it would
be like the live stitches it would be effectively casting the stitches off.
I hope you found that tutorial on grafting your stitches together helpful. We're able to keep all
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