When I was starting out as a knitter, I encountered the instruction "yarn over" and was utterly befuddled. Yarn over where? How did you make a yarn over, and what did it do?
I was even more puzzled the first time I did one by accident and didn't notice it until many rows later. What was that hole? What happened?
A yarn over is one of the simplest forms of increasing stitches. It is usually abbreviated in patterns as "YO." To work a yarn over, you just wrap the yarn over the right-hand needle. Move the yarn from front to back, so that the right-hand "leg" of the stitch is in front. Then go about the rest of your knitting as usual.
Yarn overs are usually used as part of a decorative motif, because they are very noticeable. If you just want to sneak an easy increase into your project, don't use yarn overs. People will definitely be able to tell!
The accidental yarn over usually happens when your attention slips for a moment, and you don't stick the right-hand needle into a stitch on the left-hand needle first. You wrap the yarn over and pull it to the side, but without actually catching a stitch on the left-hand needle.
Accidental yarn overs can be puzzling, because there is clearly a hole in your knitting, but it's not unraveling, and it's not a dropped stitch. In fact, if you look carefully, you can see that a stitch starts directly above the yarn over. (This is the stitch that you knit into the yarn over, creating a new column of stitches.)
Unfortunately there is no good solution for an accidental yarn over. You can drop back that extra stitch to get rid of it, but then you are left with a lot of extra yarn that you have to work in left and right to even out the fabric. Frankly, just ripping back - or deciding to ignore it - is probably your best option.
Image courtesy Flickr/Sydigill
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