Day 11: Cowl Part 2 – Garter Stitch

Hi, everyone, I'm Jen Lucas from The Knitting Circle, and welcome back to our 14-Day Learn to Knit series. In this lesson, we're gonna be working the first section of our cowl. The whole thing is worked in garter stitch, which is just knitting every row, so it's very easy. Let's go ahead and take a look. Now that we've cast on and knit that one wrong side row, our setup row, we're ready to work the garter stitch section, so if I just unbutton this here, we're gonna be working this section right here. And so, let's go ahead and take a look at our pattern here. So, now we're on part two, garter stitch. Very easy directions. Rows one to 38, we're going to knit all the stitches. All that means is every single row, we're going to be knitting every stitch, working garter stitch. So this, again, it's a great way to practice that knit stitch. By the end of row 38, you will have your knit stitch mastered. Now one thing I just want to briefly talk about is keeping track of how many rows that you've worked. So you can purchase something called a row counter. There's all different kinds of row counters that you can buy and anything that clicks that will count. There's ones that will twist. I personally am a pen and paper kind of person, so I would maybe stick a sticky note on my pattern and just sort of check off as I'm working rows, but you can also just work and then count. So I'll show you how to do that as we're working. So here, I just have my swatch. You're gonna have your 27 stitches on your needle. I just have 13 here, again, as a reminder, just so that you don't have to watch me knit so much back and forth, back and forth, but you'll have 27 stitches on your needle. So to knit, you're gonna just hold that yarn However you feel comfortable doing that knit stitch, and you're just going to knit across the row, inserting that needle from left to right, wrapping the yarn around, pulling that needle under and through to create the new stitch and off. And so, we're just gonna work all the way across, so now we're working row one here. We'll just keep working across. Now we're finishing row one. We're gonna flip it over. Put the needle with the stitches on it in our left hand, free needle in our right hand and knit again. So now we're on row two, which is a wrong side row, and just knitting across. And so, if we take a look at this once I finish these last few stitches, you'll see that we've created a pearl ridge or garter ridge here. And so, we had this stitch marker where we had worked that wrong side row, that first setup row in the last video, and now I've just knit two rows and you can see that I've created another row where I have these garter bumps. So the point I'm trying to make here is that when you knit two rows, then you get one of these rows that has the bumps here. So if we are working 38 stitches, we should have, or 38 rows, we'll have 19 bumps, right, because 38 divided by two is 19, so we would have 19 rows here, and then we have this one here, so we'd have 20 total. So here, if we look back at our cowl, you just bring in this knitting needle here so it's a little easier to count. You'll see here, this here, this down here, this first one, was where we worked one stitch or one row on the wrong side, and then we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. So then we have 19 rows of these garter ridges plus the one down here, that's 20 total. And so, if you don't want to get out a piece of paper, you don't have a row counter, you can simply just knit, and then every once in a while, count the number of sort of like little ridges or garter rows that you have here, and that's a very easy way to keep track of what you're doing. So, to finish this first section of this cowl, you're just going to knit for those 38 rows, and that's it. Section one of your cowl is going to be complete. There you go. Once you've finished that garter stitch section, you'll definitely have that knit stitch mastered. Thank you so much for watching me here at The Knitting Circle. I hope that you enjoyed this video and I look forward to seeing you back here to continue knitting our cowl.