Knitting through the back loop, commonly abbreviated as k tbl, creates a twisted stitch in your knitting. It can be worked as a design element, as in half- or full-twisted rib, but it can also serve a practical purpose, like to close the hole created by a yarn over. Stitch along with our Knit Through The Back Loop video tutorial or follow along step-by-step, below!

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Hi, this is Laura from Purl Soho and I’m going to demonstrate how to knit through the back loop. This is often abbreviated as KTBL. Now when you knit through the back loop, it twists your stitch. As you can see here, it can be used as a design element, like in this one by one half twisted rib. It can also be used and is commonly used to tighten up a stitch from a yarn over on the previous round, I’ll demonstrate both. 

As you can see here, I’ve worked up to this column of twisted knit stitches. Now, to accomplish that, you knit through the back loop. I’m going to show you how. So take the tip of your right needle and instead of going through the front of the stitch, you simply find the back side or the back loop of the stitch, and you insert your needle back there. Then after that, you wrap your needle as you would normally to knit. Pull it off your left needle. Now I’m going to pull the next stitch, and then I’ll demonstrate that knit through the back loop one more time. 

Okay, here we are again. Column of twisted knit stitches. I’m going to knit through the back loop. Take the tip of my needle, insert it into the back, wrap your yarn around, pull your needle through, and there we go. That’s how you knit through the back loop. I’m going to cruise across these stitches to a yarn over and then I’ll demonstrate that knit through the back loop over there.

Alright, here I am at a yarn over. This was created on the previous row around. Let me try to straighten out my fabric. You can see these little holes that are created, very intentional holes created by the yarn overs. Hopefully you can see those. There we go. Now, sometimes the yarn over creates too big a hole, and so you’ll oftentimes see in patterns to knit them through the back loop; when you knit through the back loop and twist your stitch, it kind of closes that hole up a little bit. So it’s the same principle as I showed you before. You take the tip of your needle and you just find the back side of that stitch. The back loop. If you think of ’em as little legs this is a front leg and the back leg, insert your needle back there, knit as you normally would. And there you can see, hopefully, we have a little twisted stitch here above a beautiful yarn over right below. I can show you how to do that one more time. Here we go. We’ve reached our next yarn over. I’m going to take the tip of my needle through the back loop, knit as you normally would, but twisted stitch, now. I can keep on going.

Here’s our last yarn over. Oops. Here we go. Got my needle through the back loop. Here we go. That’s knitting through the back loop.


KNIT THROUGH THE BACK LOOP: STEP-BY-STEP

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To knit through the back loop, take the tip of your right needle, and instead of inserting it into the front of the stitch, insert it into the back of the stitch. Then, knit the stitch as you normally would, wrapping the yarn counter-clockwise around your working needle and pulling it through. 

Knit Through The Back Loop (k tbl) | Purl Soho

The result is a twisted knit stitch, where the legs of the “v” overlap. And here you can see, a column of twisted stitches looks like a pretty braid. That’s it… That’s knit through the back loop!

Knit Through The Back Loop (k tbl) | Purl Soho

Our Facet Yoke Pullover, with it s beautiful twisted rib, is a fabulous way to get some k tbl practice!

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