Knit Box Pleat

Hi, I am going to be showing you how to work a box pleat. And this is something, this is a technique that we use in our box pleat top.

We’re going to start by knitting seven stitches. Then we’re going to load the next seven stitches slipping as if to purl onto our first double pointed needle. We’ll call that needle A. Like so. We’re going to do that one more time with needle B. And this is our starting setup for our first fold: we have our right main needle, needle a, needle B, and our left main needle. And the way that we work our first fold is you take needles A and B, and you put them into a V like so, and you fold that V together like this, and you’re going to take the folded V and place it in the front of your left main needle just like this. 

And then you’re going to line your needles up. And what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be knitting three stitches together off of these three needles. And you can do it with your right main needle. But I find it’s a bit easier to take another double pointed needle to knit the three together. And how it works is that you just go into the first needle, first stitch the second stitch, and then the third stitch, and you knit those three together. Like this, and you slide all three off your needle at once like this. It could be a bit tricky, but the more you do it, the easier it gets. So you go into the first stitch, the second, and then the third and knit three together and then slide all three off your needle. And we’re going to be doing that seven times like so. 

And then put your needles double pointed aside for a moment, and then you’re going to take the stitches that you just worked and you’re going to place them back onto your right main needle slipping as if to purl, just like so. And that gives us the first part of our fold for our box plate, just like that. For the second fold, we’re going to repeat what we just did on this side and that we’re going to take another double pointed needle and we can call it needle A. You can let your working yarn fall to the back and slip as if to purl seven stitches to needle A, and then take another needle and put seven onto it. 

So it looks like the fold that we just worked to start. The difference here is instead of putting the needles A and B into a V this way, we’re going to put it in an upside down V like this. And then we’re going to put them together. And unlike this side where we put the fold in front of our left main needle, we’re going to put the fold to the back of the left needle. I’m going to line our needles and our stitches up just as we did for the other side, and knit the three stitches together just as we did for that side. 

Again, using, I like to use another double pointed needle to do that. So you’re going to go in the first, the second, and the third stitch and knit the three together and slide the three off your needle… Like so. It helps sometimes to just pause and line them up and make sure that you’re getting through all three, and slip off your needle. And again, you’re going to do that seven times. Put our two down, and once again, we’re going to take the stitches that we just worked and load them back on slipping as if to purl our right main needle. 

And then you just knit the remaining stitches to the end, and that gives us our box pleat. And you have the stitches neatly, neatly joined together. And then this is what it looks like in the back and you can block it. And that is our box pleat.