Increase: Making Stitches, Not Just Making More

In everyday English, to increase something is to make it larger in quantity, size or degree. You increase your speed, your savings, your vocabulary. The word points outward to growth.

In knitting, an increase is a specific hand technique that creates one or more new stitches on the needle. The knitter works into the same stitch twice, or lifts a horizontal strand between stitches and works it as a new loop, or uses other methods to generate additional stitches without casting on. Each method leaves a distinct visual trace in the finished fabric: a decorative eyelhole, a subtle ladder, or a barely visible join. An increase is measured in stitches added, not inches of width, though width naturally follows.

The two senses converge in practice. A knitter increases stitches to increase the width of a garment. The hand motion of creating a stitch serves the goal of making the whole larger. Yet the knitting term is never about size alone; it names the discrete action, the mechanism by which width is achieved row by row.

Both meanings rest on the same root metaphor of addition and expansion. But in knitting, the word has crystallized around the technical procedure, not the outcome. A knitter speaks of an increase the way a machinist speaks of a cut or a feed rate: as a repeatable operation with consistent, measurable results.