- [Kristen] Today in How To Loom Knit,
we'll be knitting the flat knit stitch.
This is lesson 3.1
(upbeat music)
Welcome to GoodKnit Kisses.
We're all about helping you stitch your love
and love your stitches.
Remember that we covered all four of the different
knit stitches on the previous video,
so click down in the link below
to understand their properties.
In this video,
we'll be covering just how to make this stitch.
Let's get started on the flat knit stitch.
As you remember in our last video
where we actually worked with the yarn,
we worked on the cast on,
and I had you do three different cast ons,
practice working them
and taking them back off the loom
to get used to casting on.
For this video,
you're going to need to cast on 22 stitches.
You can use your 24 peg round loom
if that's the one that you're using.
I'm gonna demonstrate on this loom over here,
but I've set this loom up to show you what I want you to do,
and I'm having you do 22 cast on because if you
keep these two blank while you're first learning,
you won't accidentally connect these two.
If I had you go to all 24,
it'd be easy to accidentally connect them,
and I just want you to concentrate
on working back and forth.
And so I'm gonna give you some homework at the end
and tell you how long to knit for you particular stitch.
They're all gonna be slightly different
whenever you get your sample knit up.
It's going to be approximately a square for you,
and you can also refer back
to this video to tell which one did I do.
Was it flat,
was it U,
was it true,
was it e-wrap.
Go ahead and start casting on.
It doesn't matter if you're doing the chain cast on,
which is actually what I have here.
If you do the double e-wrap
or if you do the e-wrap flat.
All right, so go ahead and cast on 22 stitches.
Pause your video,
and meet me back up for working this stitch.
All right, so the flat knit stitch is super easy to do,
but it is easy to have it really tight tension,
so you wanna make sure you're not doing it too tight.
If you end up being a nice loose knitter,
bonus 'cause that's great for you.
I was never a loose knitter when it came to this,
so I have some tricks to make it not too tight.
All right, so the flat knit,
what's happening is you're just laying
the yarn right over the top of your pegs.
Now, right now I'm working left to right,
but I'll be working the other direction
so you can see that in a moment here.
Just watch for this first time.
We're gonna take our yarn,
which is currently in the back of this stitch,
and we're gonna just put it in the front.
And you're gonna lay it over your stitch.
I like to go over two or three.
When I lay it over the entire thing,
which you can,
if I do that,
what happens is I end up pulling my yarn too tightly,
and it ends up being way too tight
to manage on the next several rows.
So I just loosely lay it over these first few,
and just lift up and over.
That's it.
All right.
Go to the next one,
lift up and over.
Make sure and kind of loosen up right after I've done one.
You can even pull on them a little bit.
Then come knit over here.
Lift up and over.
This is knitting over
or knitting off.
And that's it.
It's as simple as that.
So we're gonna go all the way down.
Just do a few more here,
and you'll complete your row.
Work these last two.
Okay.
And also, another thing you can do
is put your finger back here to hold them
and I'll show you how to do that in a moment.
So now that we're at the end,
we're just going to put our yarn to the front again,
and work in the other direction.
I'll hold them and even hold it to the back
to kind of get these stitches to kinda stay
so when I put my finger behind this stitch,
it keeps this top part from popping off.
Lift up and over,
and to me it goes a little bit faster.
And when I'm sort of balancing my project on my belly
or something or on my lap,
it works really easy when I'm just sitting
there in my recliner doing my thing.
So that's how you do it.
That's all you need to know for the flat knit stitch.
So continue working on your row
and pause your video when you get to the end.
See you in a moment.
You thought we were on to homework.
I wanna show you how to undo your stitch.
If I lift up my loom,
you can see the back here
and you see this little loop in the back.
That's actually your purl stitch
because the front is knit,
and as you saw in the overview,
the back is purl.
So if you need to undo it,
you just take this loop here,
and lift up and over and undo it.
And then take your yarn
and you're ready to go to the next one.
You can also kinda hold up on here
and give yourself tension
and lift up on the loop,
and then you can see that little piece peeking in the back,
and then lift, down,
and that will undo the loop as well.
So this is a little troubleshooting
right here on this video.
So coming back,
we can do a flat knit just one at a time like that.
And that still flat knits as well.
All right, so now that you know how to do this stitch,
you can do your homework.
Ew, homework, Kristen?
Yes, you're gonna get really good.
Okay, so these are going to be approximately a square.
You can, of course,
try and measure,
but as you know,
they stretch out a bit,
and the easiest way to tell
is when you actually take it off the loom.
So I'm gonna give you some rows to do.
Just go ahead and do it by those rows
and take it off.
It's okay if it's not a full square.
And then the way you take it off of the loom
is you get some scrap yarn of a contrasting color.
It doesn't have to be the,
it doesn't have to be the same yarn.
That's totally fine.
It can be just a lighter, smoother yarn.
And you're just gonna take your tapestry needle
and go up through that loop.
Pull this all the way through leaving a tail,
and then take these loops off.
And you can go all the way through.
You can go from the bottom
or you can go from the top and down.
Just do it all the same all the way around.
There's no right or wrong.
If you wanna know how to count your stitches
as you go or your rows as you go,
you can use a row counter like this one
or you can use tally marks on a paper.
And another thing that I like to do
is while this yarn is on here
or this sample is on here,
I can pull it to the back
and I can just count how many purl rows I've done.
So the back, of course, is purl,
and all you have to do
is look at these little bumps here.
Let me turn mine over and show you.
So when we look at the back,
you can see there's the stitch up here
and it looks like the back of it has this little bump,
it looks like a scarf on the back of someone's head.
So you can actually count the rows.
And I'm just gonna count all the bumps that are lined up.
One, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, 10.
Zoom to the bottom.
And then the last one is this one
because then we have our cast on.
So then you know you have that amount of rows,
and then you just take it off of the loom.
What's going to happen is you'll
end up with one large sample,
relatively a square,
and then when we do the next four videos
or the next three videos on knitting,
then you will have four of these
with live stitches at the top with your yarn through them.
And then when we do the bind off video
which is taking the loops off of your loom
and finishing more like this,
then you're gonna get practice several times
in working that bind off.
So you'll get really good and comfortable with it,
or hopefully.
All right, so go ahead and do your homework.
You're gonna work 36 rows for flat knit.
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Thanks for joining us today
where we help you stitch your love
and love your stitches.
See you again soon.