Increase or decrease evenly across a row or round

Free knitting calculator for calculating how to increase the number of stitches evenly across a row or round. Suitable for beginners as well as experienced knitters.

Would you rather do the calculation on your own?

Calculators are all right, but sometimes it's worth the time to figure out how you calculate these things on your own. Here we explain how you can increase stitches evenly, but you can calculate how to decrease evenly in the same manner.

The "easy" case

Suppose you have 200 stitches and would like to increase by 10 to 210 stitches. All you need to do is divide 200 by 10: 200 / 10 = 20. This means that for every 20th stitch you knit, you should increase by one. If you don't use a circular needle you should increase the first stitch after knitting 10 stitches instead of 20. This is to avoid having to increase the last stitch in the row. If you enter 200 and 210 in the above calculator you'll get instructions in alignment with what we just calculated.

The "hard" case

On the other hand, suppose you have 300 stitches and want to increase by 21 to 321 stitches. Now it gets a bit more complicated, but it's still completely doable. Start by doing the same division as previously: 300 / 21 ≈ 14.3. This means that, in theory, you should increase by one stitch every 14.3th stitch you knit. Of course, that's not possible. Increasing every 14th stitch is too often, and every 15th stitch is too scarce. Therefore you should sometimes increase after 14 stitches and other times after 15.

Suppose first that you increase after every 14th stitch. Then you have increased all 21 stitches after 14 × 21 = 294 stitches, and you have 6 stitches left to knit. This means you should increase after every 15th mask 6 times and every 14th stitch for the rest of the row. In summary:

  • Increase one stitch after every 15th stitch 6 times
  • Increase one stitch after every 14th stitch 15 times

Now you're almost done. To make your increase completely even, you shouldn't just increase after every 15th stitch all 6 times in a row. In stead, you should switch between increasing after the 14th and 15th stitch. The easiest way do divide this out evenly is probably just to try it out with pen and paper. As before, it's a good idea to avoid increasing the last stitch in the row. Enter 300 and 321 in the calculator to get a suggestion.