KYOK: stitch structure

I am gradually working through showing the structures of a variety of knitting stitches, to illustrate, step by step, the path the yarn takes to make each technique. This post is about a double increase commonly known as either KYOK or (k1, yo, k1) in one stitch. That is, three stitches are made from a single stitch: knit one, yarnover, and another knit one.

I am not going to provide instructions for how to knit this increase here; there’s lots of tutorials for this technique online. Here is a KYOK tutorial that looks good to me.

My other stitch structure posts can be found in my stitch structure tag or from the stitch structure link at the top of this page.

Notes:

1. These posts aren’t meant as instructions for how to work these stitches; instead I’m showing the structure of the resulting stitches. In aid of that, I am not showing needles in the stitches as I feel they make it harder to see the fabric structure.
2. The yarn is drawn to be much thinner relative to the stitch size than would be practical for actual knitting. This helps make it easier to see the structure, but it doesn’t look exactly like the final knitting.
3. For this post, it might be useful to look first at my structure post for the looping provisional cast-on.

Figure 1: There are two rows of knitting, three stitches wide (imagine that there are more stitches to either side). I’ve drawn the first knit stitch of row three, with loose yarn behind the other two stitches that haven’t been worked yet. I plan to work three stitches anchored in the next stitch, adding two extra stitches to the knitting at this point. Turning one stitch into three is called a double increase.

My plan is to work three stitches in this one stitch. But I can’t just knit the stitch three times, as demonstrated in my structure post about elongated stitches. That would make a super large single stitch. I need to make a way to fasten the bottom of each stitch leg so they’re held in place. There’s several ways to do this, but here’s a favorite.

However, first I’m going to redraw the setup to make room for the extra two stitches.

Figure 2: Each outer column of stitches is now leaning outward; this happens after increases in general. (The increases push the new stitches outward to make room.) I’ve enlarged the stitch that I’ll be drawing the three new stitches in more than it would actually be enlarged in the knitting. That center stitch does get enlarged in reality, pulling a little slack from the stitches to each side, just not this much, (See photo at end of post for how this stitch actually looks in context.)

Figure 3: the first stitch has been knit into the stitch from the row below, with the active yarn waving around in the back, waiting for the next step. The bottom of each leg of that knit stitch is anchored in the row below.

Figure 4: The yarn has been wrapped around the needle to make a yarnover next to that first knit stitch. The leg of the yarnover that’s attached to the knit stitch is anchored, but the other leg of the yarnover is still waving around, unattached.

Possible question: You might wonder what would happen if I went on and knit the next regular stitch at that point. Is (k1, yo) in one stitch a feasible way to turn one stitch into two? Not exactly, because that second leg isn’t anchored. If I went on and knit the third stitch in the second row above, it would put a yarnover between two regular knit stitches. The yarnover would not appear to be emerging from the stitch next to the knit stitch I’ve drawn in that enlarged stitch. If you want to make one stitch into two, I know of a number or options: kfb, right lifted increases, left lifted increases, or (k1, p1) in one stitch. (That last is the closest in structure to kyok, and I will be illustrating it another time.)

Figure 5: I’ve skipped ahead a bit here. I’ve drawn the second knit stitch in the enlarged stitch and then gone on to pull a knit stitch through the third stitch from the row below. This row is complete.

If you look at the three stitches made from the enlarged stitch, you can see that all three of them have legs that are held in place by other stitches; they won’t move around. The tops of all the stitches would need to be anchored by more stitches to keep them from running if they were real stitches, but that happens in the next row.

A thing I find really interesting is that when a yarnover is anchored to a stitch this way, instead of being a regular yarnover made between other stitches, it doesn’t make a hole bigger than a regular knit stitch. This is because the bottom legs of the yarnover in the KYOK are pinched together. The only hole made by a KYOK is the slight enlargement of the stitch that the KYOK emerges from.

Figure 6: I knit a sample of a KYOK in white yarn. Three stitches fan out from a slightly enlarged single stitch, all surrounded by plain knitting. An unedited photo is to the left; on the right, I’ve colored in the three rows that I illustrated above to match, and then colored the fourth row of stitches in yellow. Something I hadn’t expected here: the actual yarnover of the KYOK recedes and shrinks so much (at least in this yarn, surrounded by stockinette) that it’s barely visible at all. But the enlargement of the stitch that holds the KYOK is quite visible, even if it’s not so large as in my illustration.