How to Work a Yarn Over (YO)

A yarn over is the littlest move in knitting — wrap the yarn once around the needle — and it does two jobs at once: it adds a stitch, and it leaves a neat round hole where the wrap was made. It is how lace grows: our Bilby onesie’s lace yoke is quite literally grown with yarn-overs, and every eyelet diamond and eyelet yoke in the baby knits is a yarn over holding hands with a decrease.

Step by step

Start from the ordinary knit position, yarn at the back of the work. A yarn over between two knit stitches begins simply by bringing the yarn forward between the two needles, as if you were about to purl.
Take the yarn up and over the right-hand needle, front to back, so it makes one full wrap and ends at the back again, ready to knit. That wrap is the yarn over — it sits on the needle as a new stitch, looser and more slanted than its neighbours, and that is exactly right.
Knit the next stitch as normal. Count as you finish the pair: you should have one more stitch than you started the pair with, and one small hole beneath the wrap. If there’s no hole, the wrap slipped off — an easy fix if you catch it on the same row.
Understand the pairing, because lace depends on it: a yarn over adds a stitch, so patterns that want the count to stay steady marry it to a decrease — k2tog or ssk — in the same row. Yarn over plus decrease equals an eyelet with the stitch count unchanged; forget either partner and the count quietly wanders.
On the following row, treat each yarn over as an ordinary stitch: purl it (on a wrong-side row) or knit it (on a right-side row) through its front leg like any other stitch, unless your pattern says otherwise. Working it through the back loop twists it shut and closes the hole — lovely for invisible increases, wrong for lace, so only do it when told.
Between a knit and a purl, the yarn is already at the front: simply carry it over the needle to the back and then bring it forward under the needle to purl — one wrap, no extras. Between a purl and a knit, wrap the yarn right around the needle once before knitting. These sound fussy written down; do each one twice slowly and your hands file them away.
Keep your wrap snug and single. A double wrap makes a long, droopy hole and an oversized stitch next row — patterns that want one will say “yarn over twice” in so many words, so a double wrap you didn’t plan is just a mistake with confidence.
Count your stitches at the end of every lace row, and eyeball the holes: eyelets in a pattern should line up in tidy diagonals or diamonds, and a hole in the wrong place is the earliest, kindest warning that a wrap or a decrease went missing a few rows back.
Working in the round, nothing changes: bring the yarn forward, over the needle, and knit on — the rounds of an eyelet yoke are just rows that never turn around, and your wraps will sit waiting for you in the next round like all the other stitches.

Patterns that use it

Aussie Baby Onesies Vol 2 | 12 Knitted Baby Onesie Patterns PDF

Aussie Baby Onesies Vol 3 | 12 Knitted Baby Onesie Patterns PDF

Baby Blanket Knitting Pattern — 6 Aussie Animal Blankets: Koala Wombat Kangaroo Platypus Quokka Echidna, DK PDF, Cot and Pram Size

Only one catalogue description says “yarn over” outright (the Vol 2 onesies, whose lace yoke is “grown with yarn-overs”); the other two are linked because their copy names eyelet lace and eyelet yokes, which are knitted with yarn overs.

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Common mistakes

Letting the wrap slip off the needle as you knit the next stitch. You end the row one stitch down and with no hole to show for it — if there’s no eyelet beneath where the wrap sat, it escaped on that same row.
Forgetting one half of the partnership. A yarn over without its decrease grows the stitch count row by row, and a decrease without its yarn over shrinks it — lace forgives neither, it just quietly changes size.
Working the yarn over through the back loop on the next row out of habit. That twists the wrap shut and the eyelet vanishes — for lace, work it through its front leg like any ordinary stitch unless the pattern says otherwise.

Tina’s tips

Run a lifeline — a length of smooth scrap yarn threaded through every stitch of a good row — at the end of each pattern repeat. If a mistake sneaks in, you unpick back to the line and not one stitch further, and lace stops being scary.
Pop a marker between each lace repeat. When your end-of-row count is out, the markers tell you exactly which repeat went wandering, so you’re checking ten stitches instead of two hundred.