Is Brioche Knitting in Your Skills Toolbox?

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This January, we’re focusing on a low-pressure and fun resolution: learning the fundamentals of a knitter’s toolknit. Browse by technique to decide what you’d like to learn this year, and pick some patterns to keep yourself motivated! This time, we take a look at brioche knitting!

Brioche is bouncy, boingy fun. Working pairs of yarnovers and slipped stitches gives you a delightfully squooshy ribbed fabric, all the better for snuggling. Brioche stitch practically screams cowls and scarves; work a basic brioche rib in a bulky yarn on large needles, and you have a gift-ready project in no time.

Brioche has a reputation of being a fiddly stitch, but it’s less a matter of difficulty and more a matter of learning what you’re seeing. You’ll quickly learn to recognize a stitch, which in brioche means a combination of a knit or purl stitch with its paired yarnover, and discover how each round is worked in two passes. Here’s how we recommend easing into the technique!

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Knitting brioche feels like magic. As you incorporate sets of yarnovers and slip stitches into the fabric, something completely new emerges, such as a squishy warm cowl, hat, or sweater with plenty of bouncy stretch and visual interest. If you’d like to learn how to knit this popular stitch, Faina Goberstein is your ideal guide!

If you’re familiar with Faina, you already know that she LOVES texture. She has a passion for combining 3-dimensional stitch patterns with gorgeous plush yarns to create irresistible garments and accessories.

It’s no wonder she loves brioche! Brioche knitting provides a toolbox of techniques to create her comfortable, sophisticated designs. Now she’s sharing her brioche toolbox with you in her set of brioche knitting workshops: Basic Brioche & Beyond and Bold Brioche Cables.

What is Brioche Knitting?

Some say that brioche stitch is named after the stacked bread roll because it has yarnovers stacked on top of slipped stitches. True or not, as with brioche bread, those layers can complicate things but they also make it special.

Brioche stitch produces a lofty, sumptuous fabric that is also completely reversible—perfect for projects where you’re likely to see both sides of the fabric, such as a scarf or a shawl. For that reason, brioche accessories can keep you cozy on the coldest winter days: the fabric’s construction and texture traps warm air inside.

Here’s Mercedes Tarasovich-Clark in an excerpt from her book Brioche Chic, explaining brioche stitch:

To create this unique structure, we rely on an alternating pattern of slipped and knit (or purled) stitches. Each row or round is worked in two passes, which equal one completed row or round.

As alternate stitches are worked, they’re not merely slipped but slipped while a companion yarnover is simultaneously worked. This stitch, the sl1yo, is what creates brioche knitting’s “enmeshed” structure.

Once you have sl1yo stitches in place, these stitch/yarnover pairings are either knit or purled in the brioche method, as a brk (brioche knit) or brp (brioche purl). This is a stitch combination that creates a stitch/yarnover pairing, which counts as a single stitch.

Mercedes Tarasovich-Clark, Brioche Chic

These stitch/yarnover pairings make up the majority of all brioche stitch structures; you’re usually alternating between slipping a stitch while creating a yarnover, or knitting/purling a stitch with its existing yarnover.

Written instructions for brioche always feel a bit dense, but once you understand the steps, it can actually be a simple and meditative stitch to work. It is not, however, a particularly quick stitch to work, as you must work each round twice. All that thick texture takes time!

Steps to Learn Brioche

Faina loves teaching first-time brioche knitters as well as advanced folks. In Basic Brioche & Beyond, she starts off with the very basics.

You’ll learn stitches for one-color and two-color brioche and what these stitches look like on a chart. You’ll quickly catch on to the repetitive rhythm of the stitches and move on to impressive projects knitted in the round with two colors of yarn.

Watch Faina knit the brioche stitches in both English and Continental style, and you’ll be ready to try for yourself, whether you’re more comfortable holding the yarn in your left or right hand.

Once you’re familiar with how the basic stitches work, you’ll move into shaping brioche fabric with increases and decreases. Shaping in brioche is a little different than in a standard stockinette fabric but still easily doable. Faina works slowly and clearly so you can see exactly how each stitch is formed.

As well as the possibilities for garment and shawl shaping, you’ll be on your way to knitting popular leaf motif patterns with incredible color and depth.

Next Steps in Brioche

Once you’ve mastered the basics, you can start to knit garments and shaped accessories such as hats. There are also a number of brioche stitch variations (seriously, a lot) that you can dive into! There are so many ways you can continue to expand your skill set with brioche.

Grafting Brioche Stitch

Once you’re confident in the structure of brioche, you’re ready to try grafting a brioche project into a seamless tube. This is a crucial skill for making brioche cowls and headbands, but it could come into play in a garment pattern, too.

But here’s the thing—because each row of brioche stitch requires two passes, your graft will require two passes as well. Here’s how to graft brioche stitch, step-by-step, plus a free download for the Unified Field Cowl pictured above.

Brioche Cables

From there, you’ll want to dive into those crave-able cables in brioche stitch that you might’ve seen on social media. Faina’s brioche cable workshop demonstrates how to work a basic brioche cable while laying out tips for success. Things get really interesting when she shows how to take a cable—any cable—and translate it into brioche.

Things get even more exciting when you apply two-color brioche to cables which, unlike standard cables, are completely reversible. Some cables create a true mirror image on the reverse side, while others have strikingly different sides, resulting in a unique effect.

Best-Loved Brioche Patterns

Here are a few brioche patterns in a variety of difficulty levels. So much is possible with this technique—use it at the hems of a sweater for a cozy and chic addition, create allover cabled texture, or work simple fabric that’s unbelievably plush and warm.

No wonder brioche projects have been popping up everywhere—the technique is intriguing yet easy to learn and the results are stunning.

Now it’s time to learn the stitch! Start with the fundamentals, with Faina guiding you stitch by stitch. Then move on to those brioche cables! We hope these ideas spark an irresistible desire to learn how to knit brioche. It’s likely to become a fast favorite once you master the basics!

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Save on Faina’s workshops by purchasing them both together! For more information we’ve also got a free eBook about brioche that includes 5 free brioche knitting patterns.

Originally published 11/1/2017. Updated 1/15/2021.

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Resources to Master Brioche Knitting