How to Pick Up Two New Stitches from One Selvedge Stitch.

So, for button bands on cardigans and the headband parts of Dog Days 3 & 4, I’ve been picking up a couple of extra stitches to keep from having a drawn-in button band or having to work very loosely to make a headband fit. This is probably pretty intuitive for a lot of people, but for me, it was a novel technique, and I was a little worried it wouldn’t be intuitive for everyone.

For most of the stitches—usually 2 or 3 in a row, the way I’ve been doing it—you just cruise along, picking up one stitch from each slipped stitch that makes up the selvedge line. Your needle goes under both legs (yarns? It’s a very short amount of yarn) that make up that slipped stitch, and it looks very neat and nice.

Every third or fourth stitch, you pick up one stitch from the front leg (that is the most awkward terminology), and then another from the back. It’s very similar to kf&b or kfb, where you knit into the front of the stitch and then into the back to increase.

This doesn’t look as neat at first, which bothered me a lot, but it blends in as you go, and doesn’t seem to be noticeable once the knitting is done and blocked.

And that’s how I knit button bands at the moment. Techniques vary, and I think there’s no one right way to do anything in knitting, but that’s sort of a quick overview/photo tutorial of what I do to end up with what strikes me as the right amount of stitches for something like this.