Why Does My Seed Stitch Look Like Ribbing?

Hi everyone. I'm Jen Lucas from The Knitting Circle. Have you ever been knitting seed stitch and then seemingly out of nowhere it seems to turn into knit one, purl one ribbing? It's a very common mistake that happens with seed stitch but fortunately, it's avoidable. I'm gonna show you how to read your seed stitch so that you can avoid this common mistake. Let's get started. A common problem while working seed stitch is that you're working along, you're working along, you're creating your nice knit one, purl one seed stitch. You're getting this nice texture and then suddenly it turns into ribbing. So I want to just talk about things you can do, how to watch your knitting as you're working so that you can avoid this. Because once this happens, you're going to have to go back and fix this because obviously it's a pretty noticeable error. So I have a little swatch that has some seed stitch on it and when working seed stitch here, I've worked over an odd number of stitches. So every single row I'm gonna be knitting one and purling one all the way to the end and then knitting one. So to work the seed stitch, we're just gonna knit one, bring the yarn between the needles to the front and purl one. And so as you're working this, what you wanna notice is that you're purling the knits and knitting the purls. And what do I mean by that? So we're coming to our next stitch, we're gonna knit. You can see here I have a purl bump. So it looks like a purl. So I'm going to knit it. The next stitch, you can see I have my V of the knit stitch, I'm gonna purl it. So it looks like a purl, we're gonna knit. Next stitch looks like a knit, we're gonna purl. So a lot of times what ends up happening, is here I just purled, you accidentally purl the next stitch and see now, now I've gotten myself into a situation where I'm knitting that knit and I'm purling that purl and you can even just see right here I've just now I've started creating ribbing. So if I just back that out, coming back here to fix it, that looks like a purl. I wanna knit, that's looks like a knit I'm gonna purl. So most commonly what happens is either something like I just showed you. You accidentally purl two stitches next to each other instead of maintaining the knit one, purl one. You accidentally knit two somewhere or purl two somewhere. Or the other common mistake that happens is you start with the wrong stitch at the beginning of your row. So here where I have the odd number of stitches, every row is gonna be the same for me. But no matter what your pattern tells you, if you're working in seed stitch you can see this first stitch here is a purl, so I know I need to knit it. Next stitch is a knit, so to do seed stitch I know I need to purl it. So it's really just about reading your knitting and trying to catch that ribbing error before you get too far along in your project and you have to rip back a bunch of rows. But those are some common ways that you accidentally turn your seed stitch into ribbing. And there you go. All you need to remember is that you're knitting the purls and you're purling the knits. If you learn how to read your seed stitch, it's really very simple and at least if you do make a mistake you should be able to recognize it very quickly and fix it and get back to that seed stitch. Thanks so much for watching me here at The Knitting Circle. I hope that you enjoyed this video. Be sure to take a look around our website for more great knitting content. I'll see you again soon.