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Duplicate stitch is awesome and I am so happy to share it with you today! Duplicate stitch is a wonderful and easy way to add colorwork to your knitting, and is performed after you have knitted an item. With duplicate stitch, all you will need to add a color chart to your knitting is a tapestry needle and some yarn. I find this technique to be a little easier than performing colorwork as you knit an item like with fair isle, intarsia, and stranded knitting, as it does not require you to manage multiple balls of yarn while you’re knitting.
Here is a video of me below showing how to do the technique, and below that you will find the heart chart I use in the video:
You will need to thread your needle with approximately 26 inches of yarn to make this heart. In the video you will notice I cut out me doing Row 4 of the chart (it got kinda boring, lol), but hopefully you caught on at the point 🙂 Again, the basic concept to duplicate a stitch is that you come through the stitch below the one you’re duplicating from back to front, back and around the stitch above the one you’re duplicating, then back through the stitch below from the front to the back of your knitting.
Here are a few tips that will help you when using this technique:
- Count how many stitches tall and wide the chart is (this heart is 5 by 5 for example), then mark where you would like your chart to be positioned on your knitted item. If you are applying a chart to a glove for example, you want to make sure the chart will end up centered on your hand height wise and width wise, so be sure to try the glove on to determine which stitch you would need to start on for the chart to end up centered.
- I find it easiest to work charts back and forth, from the bottom up, as you will see me do in the video.
- You may need to adjust the tension of your stitches after you finish to make sure they look even with the others, which you can do with your tapestry needle.
- If you make a mistake, no need to worry, you can easily rip it out and start over and it won’t affect your knitting!
- Have fun!
I hope this tutorial was helpful, and please let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment below!
P.S. The Girly Knits patterns that I mention in the video that use duplicate stitch are Be My Valentine and Eye Candy. Each of those patterns have lots of fun opportunities to practice duplicate stitch!