Increases and Decreases

I’m obsessed about increases and decreases. I almost always make a swatch for each project to decide on which increase and decrease to use. Top down designs are particularly challenging as increases often have to be worked on every row and not many increases look good that way.

In my most recent design Matilde Cardigan, I had one more problem: the design is asymmetric. One raglan seam is worked with increases and the other is worked with decreases. After trying out all the increases I knew about, I came up with my own. Here you are:

Lifted increase used in Matilde Cardigan

inc1-L – insert left needle into the st below the one just worked from back to front, push and lift the right leg of that st, knit into the lifted st from this position.
inc1-R – knit into the back leg of next st, without releasing it, knit also into the front leg of the same st, release it. Do not confuse it with kfb (knit into front then back of same stitch).

In this swatch, we are going to work k3, inc1-L, inc1-R,…