Not for the novice knitter, the steek technique involves making a planned cut in your knitting to create a hole or to open up an in-the-round tube. Obviously, you can’t just slice up your existing knitting or everything unravels so you have to steek. Your knitting patterns may or may not specifically call for a steek, but you can decide for yourself when this technique would work well for you.

Why Use a Steek?

There aren’t a lot of situations that would require a steek. It’s mainly used with larger in-the-round projects such as the body of a sweater. You can steek to create the armholes, or to open up the front to make a cardigan. Being able to work in-the-round and not worry about openings is better for some people, especially if you are doing a Fair Isle design.  

How to Steek

This can be a difficult technique to understand without some visual aids, and there is more than one way to steek. There are a number of really good videos and complete tutorials online that can help walk you through various approaches for steeking if you need to get a better view of what you’re doing.

The first step is to stabilize your stitches on either side of your intended cut. This is the key to proper steeking, and where you can choose your preferred method. Using a crochet stitch is the easiest. Working on the wrong side of your knitting, use the same color of yarn to crochet a line of single stitches along where you need to make your cut. Make sure that each stitch goes directly through each existing knit stitch. This is what prevents the unraveling later.

Then make a similar line of stitches on the other side of the intended cut. Small buttonholes can be done with just one line of knit stitches between the crochet seams, but if you are making space for an armhole, you will want to leave more knitting between each crochet seam to create a larger opening. To open up the front of a cardigan, you can just make each reinforcing seam one stitch apart.

Once both crochet seams are in place, you can carefully cut the knitting in between to create your opening. The crochet stitches should hold everything else in place, and should not be visible on the right side of the piece.

If you’re not big on crochet, you can use a small double-pointed knitting needle to create a line of knit stitches along the edge of your steek in a similar way. This is a little harder to explain but it can be easier if you are most comfortable with knitting needles rather than a crochet hook.

Try it Out

It’s recommended that you see at least one video tutorial rather than just try to slice up your knitting based on this description of steeking. Even do a few practice pieces to make sure you have the hang of it before you get to work on a larger sweater.