How to Tell the Difference Between Knit and Purl Stitches

Are you struggling with messy and inconsistent ribbing or have to mark down whether you’ve just done a knit or a purl stitch? One crucial step in knitting is learning to read your stitches or how to tell the difference between knits and purls. By learning to read your stitches, you will notice fewer mistakes and have less counting.

Explaining the Knit and Purl Stitches

Knit and purl stitches are the same stitch, just reversed. If you are working flat, this means that you will knit one row (on the right side of your work), then when you flip it over you will purl a row (wrong side). This is known as working in “Stockinette.” When working with circular needles, you are only working on the right side of your work, so you will only knit.

Purl Stitches

To start, I’ll be showing you how to identify the purl stitch. The purl stitch goes straight across the working stitching. I like to call it a hat, because it makes it look like a little top hat. I’ve marked in red, what I mean by across the front of the stitch.

It looks like it’s going across the working stitch because by inserting your needle from the front, you’ve looped the yarn in front of the working stitch, causing the band in the front.

Tip: You can also use the purl stitch to make it easier to count your rows. Just count how many bands are on your piece of knitwear. In this picture, there are 4 rows.

Knit Stitch

The knit stitch in comparison will not have that front band, but will loop around the back of the stitch. This is because you’ve inserted the needle from the back, making the yarn loop around the back of the working stitch, causing the band to be in the back. I’ve marked the loops of the knit stitch in red, to make them easier to see. This is commonly referred to as a V-shape in tutorials because it looks like a V on the knitwear.

Tip: recognizing this V will help you as you learn to pick-up stitches for necklines and sleeves when working in stockinette.

Ribbing

When adding ribbing to a project, being able to read your stitches becomes even more important. You can use this skill to determine which type of stitch you knit next. When I first learned to knit, I didn’t understand this point and would manually mark down which stitch I had done when completing ribbing. As you can imagine, this quickly became quite laborious and significantly slowed down my knitting.

To read your ribbing, you will use the skills learned above. I’ve knitted a piece of sample ribbing to show you how to read the ribbing. I’ve included a picture without the red marks and with the red marks to for you to practice reading the stitches.

The purls are marked with a red bar across the purl and the knits are marked with a V shape.

Were you able to identify which stitch was the purl and which was the knit?

If you are still struggling with your ribbing, you can check out this post. It has a deep dive explanation on ribbing. Including common mistakes and why ribbing is important in a project.

Leave a comment if this helped you level up your knitting!