Butterfly Stitch

Hi there, I'm Corrina Ferguson for The Knitting Circle. In this video, we are going to learn how to work the beautiful butterfly stitch. So grab your needles and let's get started. So we're going to learn how to do the butterfly stitch, and the butterfly stitch is this pretty stitch here where we have slip stitches that are gathered across the front of the work, and then we use a gathering stitch, where we knit underneath those to kind of pull it all together and make this adorable butterfly shape. So we're going to learn all of the steps to make this butterfly stitch.

One of the things that I want to show you though before we learn it, is you need to keep in mind whenever you're doing work that includes a lot of slip stitches, and this has five slip stitches in a row, for every pattern repeat, it's going to compress or shorten the row gauge, which means that your whole piece of work is not going to be as tall or as long as it would be if you had just knit plain stockinette. Because basically, we're skipping stitches along in here, and that kind of draws the fabric down length wise. So just something to keep in mind when you're working on something like the butterfly stitch or something that includes a lot of slip stitches like this. So step one of the butterfly stitch is actually to slip these stitches across the front of the work, so I want to show you what that looks like. We've got our little sample here, and we've already done three rows of these slip stitches, and you see how they're slipped across the front of the work?

So let's get to see how that's done here. Let me get you over to that place. And basically we're just slipping it with the yarn to the front of the work, but we want to keep it nice and loose because we don't want to make this too tight, or make it pucker our fabric this direction. So to do the slip, we're going to bring our yarn to the front of our work, and then we're going to slip pearl wise, and when I say pearl wise, it means we're going to slip from tip to tip without twisting the stitches. So we're going to slip one, slip two, slip three, slip four and slip five.

And you'll notice that while we're doing the slipping, this yarn here is just hanging out. It's not doing anything. When we say slip a stitch, we're meaning to move the stitch from the left-hand needle to the right hand needle without working it. But then there should be other information in your patterns stitch, or your pattern that will tell you, this is slip pearl wise, and then it's with the yarn in front, and then when we need to do now to work the next stitch, which is a knit stitch, we need to bring the yarn to the back of our needles. But what I want you to make sure you do is make sure that if you have things stretched out here so that this is not too tight, and this is perfect, cause my stitches are not all jumbled up together.

And then I just work the knit stitches that are called in for the pattern. And then that's how you get all these slips that are worked across the front of the work and we're ready for the next step. So the next part of this, of course we've got our slip stitches, is to do this gathering stitch that kind of makes the center of our butterfly. So we've got our work here, ready to go. And we've got the four rows of slip stitch.

We've got the four slip stitch yarns that are running across the front of our work. And all we do to do this is we take our right hand needle tip, we're going to go under, we want to make sure we catch all four of these, we're going to go under all four of these stitches. And then we're going to wrap our yarn as if to knit, and then when we finished that, we're going to bring it back under. So let's do that again. So, we've got it ready to go.

Right hand needle tip goes under all four stitches from the bottom to the top, so under that way. We insert it into the next stitches as if to knit. We knit the next stitch and then we bring the needle out of all four of those, just like that. And that's what makes all of those stitches. Behind, this is our gathering stitch here.

They all come behind when you finish that knit stitch, and continue to knit across the row. So that's it for our butterfly stitch. All it is, is slipping some stitches across the front of the work, and then on the next right side row, working that little gathering stitch, where we go under the stitches, and you'll be able to make the beautiful butterfly stitch. Thank you so much for joining me to learn how to knit the butterfly stitch. Check out our website for more great videos.