Technique: Lateral Braid, aka Vikkel Braid

I've loved the lateral braid ever since I first discovered it. It's such a neat, decorative detail, and really fun to do. It's also called Vikkel Braid - but I have no idea where that name comes from.  But without further ado, here's the technique!

You'll need:

• your working needle
• your working yarn

and nothing else!

We are starting with a m1r, and put it back onto the left hand needle. We will always be working a pair of sts - the second st on your lhn (left hand needle) will form the next row while the first st on your lhn will form the braid. This first m1 creates an extra st that we need to keep st count consistent and get a nice start for our braid.

 Knit into the back of your second stitch, and don't drop the stitches from the lhn!

Without dropping any sts from the lhn, swing rhn (right hand needle) back to front and knit into the front of the first st.

Now, we can drop both stitches from the lhn!

But we are putting the outmost st from the rhn back onto the lhn. See the first sts of our braid? Now we can start with the next pair of sts by knitting into the back of second st, as shown in the second pic above.

This is how your braid will look after you've worked a few sts.  Not so hard, is it?

Now we've worked our way all around and are back at the start. We need to close the round and get rid of the extra st we made at the very start.

And that's done fairly simple - slip the first st onto the rhn...

... and simply slip the last braid st over the first st of next round. Slip first of next round back onto lhn and resume knitting whatever the pattern tells you.

As you can see, the jog is not perfectly hidden, but you're probably the only one able to notice. If you use darker, or variegated yarn, it's pretty much invisible.

Next one in the series: a two colored lateral braid! Also look at the link if you want to learn a perfectly seamless way to close the lateral braid.