Garter Stitch Versus Stockinette Stitch

Hi, everyone. I'm Jen Lucas from the Knitting Circle. When you're new to knitting, you might find some of the terminology a little bit confusing. For example, you might find a pattern that you really wanna knit, but it's telling you that you need to work in stockinette stitch or work in garter stitch, and you're not really sure what that means. Well, I'm here to help you.

And so let's take a look at the difference between stockinette stitch and garter stitch. Here I have two swatches. This is garter stitch here on the right. And then I have stockinette stitch here on the left. I just wanted to take a look at these two swatches together.

So then that way, you know what kind of fabric you're creating, if you're creating stockinette or garter stitch. Sometimes you might come across a pattern that might tell you something like, "knit stockinette stitch for eight inches" or "knit garter stitch for 12 inches" or something like that. And so you need to know what kind of fabric you're creating. So one thing that's very interesting to note and a big difference between these two fabrics is that these were actually worked over the same number of rows. So I started down here at the cast on and worked this way.

But garter stitch, because you're knitting on every single row, both right side and wrong side, it squishes down the fabric. It's more compact. And so you get a much more compact fabric than you would with the stockinette stitch. With garter stitch, one thing that's really nice is that the right side and wrong side pretty much look the same. So this is the right side, and here's the wrong side.

So other than maybe the cast on and bind off edges look a little bit different on the right side and wrong side, that's a very minor detail, the overall fabric looks the same on both the right side and the wrong side. Here, if we look at the stockinette stitch, this is the right side. And this is most commonly, when people think of a knitted fabric, this is the fabric that they're thinking of. So here's the right side. And then the wrong side of stockinette stitch looks like this.

If you worked this on the right side of your work, you would then have reverse stockinette stitch. But you can see even on the wrong sides, these do look a little bit similar because you have the purl bumps creating texture. But reverse stockinette stitch and garter stitch, while they do look sort of similar, they are creating two very different fabrics. Again, you can see how much more squished down the garter stitch is. The other main difference is that garter stitch, because you're knitting on every row, you only have knit stitches.

It's creating a nice flat fabric. Here with stockinette stitch, it has a natural tendency to curl. If I flip it over to the wrong side, you can see, especially along the edges this way, I did block this swatch, but it does have a natural tendency to sort of curl in. And then sometimes you'll see it's even curling a little bit up this way. So that's something just to consider when you're...

If you're working your first scarf or something like that, you might not want to work it just in plain stockinette stitch because it is gonna have a natural tendency to sort of roll in. And then quickly, I just wanted to bring in this third swatch just to show you how you can combine garter stitch and stockinette stitch together. So you'll commonly see a border of garter stitch going around your stockinette stitch here. So if you were doing something like knitting your first scarf, or you could even use this as a coaster. I've added couple stitches on either side of garter stitch.

So then I knit those stitches on both the right sides and the wrong sides. But then in the middle here, where I've done stockinette, I was knitting on the right side and purling on the wrong side. And then I just did a couple rows of garter stitch at the beginning and the end as well. But I just wanted to sort of put all my swatches together here, just so that you could see that there is quite a difference between garter stitch and stockinette stitch. There you go.

Now you know the difference between garter stitch and stockinette stitch. Thank you so much for watching me here at the Knitting Circle. I really hope that you enjoyed this video. Be sure to take a look around our website for lots of more great content. I'll see you again soon.